Mary Poppins was a Genius

Trying to find a movie that my son will watch is pretty tough. He is very sensitive, so anything with a bad guy or any kind of conflict will get him upset and he won't be able to continue watching. For instance, we tried to watch a Muppet Christmas movie last Christmas (2009). When Kermit found out that he might lose the theater, Logan freaked out. He was so sad for Kermit! Or when the reindeer tease Rudolph, he gets upset. Or when Buzz and Woody have an argument, he cries. He is just very "in tune" to any sort of emotional upset and it really has a strong effect on him. So we are always on the lookout for movies that he might be able to watch. Not because he want to turn our kids into vegetables in front of the tube, they are only allowed to watch one tv show per day. But every once in a while we like to try and watch a movie for Family Night, or we use a movie as a reward for Logan sometimes. One that we thought might work out was Mary Poppins. There are no bad guys, there are a lot of good songs, and of course there is Mary Poppins' magic! We were right, Logan loves it! And so does Coley! They watched it almost 2 weeks ago and Logan is still talking about it. Not to mention the soundtrack. I already had the soundtrack, but now that they have seen the film we have the music on CONSTANT rotation. Coley can now ALMOST pronounce "Atrocious" and "Precocious" from the Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious song (or "Docious," as she calls it). Logan wants to be Burt, and he does a cute rendition of the chimney-top dance.

Since Mary Poppins is a popular gal around here these days, I decided to put her methods to good use. I wanted to get some cleaning done the other day while Coley was napping, and I wanted to enlist Logan to help. So I told him that cleaning would be fun if we did it like Mary Poppins; we had to "Find the fun, then -SNAP- the job's a game!" So instead of washing windows and mirrors, we cleaned all the windows in our space shuttle so that we wouldn't get lost in space. And instead of sweeping and mopping the floors, we were firefighters who cleaned up the fire station. These were the only two jobs I had planned, but Logan really got into it and started looking for more to do! When we were picking up and putting things away, he even tried snapping his fingers to do it the magic way like they do in the movie. He would try to snap his fingers (it hasn't actually happened yet) and then he would quickly put the item away, pretending that it was all done with magic instead. What a cutie!

Thank you Mary Poppins, you definitely made my week a little easier; although one does grow weary of the constant stream of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and Step-in-Time. It's all a trade-off, isn't it?