This morning AJ and I actually managed to get out of the house before he realized he hadn�t watched any TV. The TV is becoming a problem. This is my fault and I know it. But sometimes I just want to sit down and the TV seems to be the only thing that allows that to happen, other than naptime.

Children�s programming is a whole different ballgame now than when I was a kid. When I was a kid, it was strictly PBS: Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and once in a while the Electric Company. When we lived in England, we had Blue Peter, Rupert the Bear and the Magic Roundabout (much more exciting than it sounds).

But AJ�s growing up with whole channels just for kids. Noggin is amazing � it runs nothing but programming for toddlers from the wee hours of the morning until 5 at night (when it mysteriously turns into a channel for middle schoolers enigmatically named "The n"). Even PBS has branched out and has many more preschool options. The odd thing about all this preschool programming is that almost all the shows seem to be made in Canada. I�m convinced that a whole generation of American kids is going to grow up with Canadian accents [The epitome of which, for me at least, is a phrase uttered by a waiter in the small Canadian town where my husband and I spent our honeymoon: �Sorry, we�re out. Yeah, eh?�].

Quite a few of the shows are actually moderately entertaining for adults, or at least adults with my sense of humor (see yesterday�s post on �Diva Hen�). But we�ve taken to making more �adult� interpretations of some of them, which make them even more entertaining. To us, at least.

This pastime began when we were trying to decipher the words to the theme song of Bob the Builder. The first line of verse one sounds for all the world like �So fuckin� busy� (it�s actually �Scoop, Muck and Dizzy�). This was also around the time that we finally figured out that Ralph Covert wasn�t actually singing �OK, kids, it�s sex time!� but �It�s next time� in his version of the ABC song � as in �Next time won�t you sing with me.�

The show we find more entertaining for this game than Jerry Falwell�s railing against Tinky-Winky as the gay Teletubby is Oswald on Nickelodeon. Voiced by Fred Savage (erstwhile child star of the Wonder Years), something about Oswald is a little�odd. The episode that really gets us in hysterics is called �Big Banana Day.� Oswald, an octopus, and his pet hot dog Weenie (I bet you can already see where this is going) decide to grow a banana plant. They plant it and water it and go to sleep in the next room. When they wake up in the morning, the banana has grown so large that it prevents them from opening the door to their bedroom. Once they worm their way out, they pack their banana in a wagon and take it around to meet all their friends, including obsessive-compulsive penguin named Henry, who comments, �My, what a big banana!�. Oswald asks some of his friends, �Would you like to see my big banana?� Children�s programming at its finest. I seriously hope the writers of this episode were fully cognizant of the double-entendres. If not, they should perhaps be considering another line of work.

If Big Banana Day is leaving you feeling a little dirty, check out this article about Mr. Rogers, the cleanest man that ever was. And the author can really write.

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