Bob the Builder

BOB THE BUILDER:
i love bob the builder. granted, i have never actually seen one of his shows, but i have his image on my beach towel courtesy of heather. really, all i needed was a thirty second blip of this confidence-building little man to make me fall...hard.

i met bob when i started watching saturday morning children's programming which comes on right before saturday mid-morning teen tv which heather and i never miss. yes, we are that cool. nick jr has a host of great kids shows, and before each, there is a cute little commercial with cartoon characters from each show interacting with real kids. the little boy comes down stairs and waves to oswald the octopus, the little girl dances with dora the explorer, and then they run up to a fence where bob, holding a paintbrush and already surrounded by able bodied helpers, asks "can we paint it?" and they all shout in reply "YES WE CAN!"

when i was baby-sitting thea and logan, thea brought out her bob the builder book. it was the kind with the peel-off stickers that you can move around to different pages. on each page there was a dilemna which required bob to ask of his helpers, "can we fix it?", "can we mend it", "can we sort them?", and the auto response?..."YES WE CAN!". and they did. and not just them, the person reading the book gets to help by moving the stickers. the book is great.

bob is great.

why? he builds self-esteem, he teaches, he is unfailingly self-assured, but he believes in other people too. plus, he's cute. somewhere there is a real man like that.

can i find him?...

i had so many ideas in my head that i wanted to post when i actually got a site, and now....blank. nothing. there are just so many directions i could go with this, that i'm afraid of getting stuck with one right now. so i think i'll just post this random train of thought today, and if anything comes to me tomorrow, watch out world!, it will be on my blog.