I have to keep watching...

Tonight, just before bath time, Billy was sitting at the table with his headphones on, watching his new favourite thing on YouTube - Theodore Tugboat.

Though many of you will not need this string of thought, I will fill in how an Australian boy in 2010 could possibly be interested in a Canadian TV show that ceased production in 1998.

YouTube, home of the quirky, can pretty much spit up a morph of any two ideas you can think of... for the uninitiated... let's play. Um, choose two random words like...

Dogs and lollipops
Motorbike and carousel
Tomato and phone

I swear I just pulled those combinations out of my head... just now. Click on the links, and behold the joyful oddness.

Billy, being of the mind that loves to dig as deeply as he can into the things that interest him, looked on YouTube and found episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine that had been re-cut with soundtracks from random other TV shows. Sometimes, it's Winnie the Pooh (the enemy of sleep - a whole other blog one day), sometimes The Three Stooges and sometimes... it's Theodore the Tugboat.

So, even though we struggle with getting him interested in important stuff like reading a clock, simple addition or eating any meat other than chicken... YouTube has now got Billy very interested in all things Theodore Tugboat.

The first challenge that goes along with this, is his requests for DVDs. We are trying very hard to explain to our child of the new milennium that DVDs were not invented in 1998, and Theodore Tugboat failed to garner the kind of audience that would encourage a major player to do a vintage 'Sonic the Hedgehog' style transfer from VHS.

The second challenge is the depth of emotion in Theodore stories. Tonight, Billy sat watching Theodore Tugboat with tears streaming down his face. One of the tugboats has been caught in a storm in the great big harbour and was separated from the other tugboats. Billy, the great lover of the family unit and hater of things that 'go away' (leftover vegetables, un-retrieved dog balls, even bath water on a bad day) wept for the temporarily lost tugboat.

We asked him if he wanted to turn it off. Through gulping tears, he said no. He insisted on watching he story to the end, despite serious ugly-face crying spasms. When the story resolved (thankfully, the clouds cleared, the tugboat found its friends and they all chugged happily about in the harbour again) he wiped his tears, took off his headphones and turned to us.

'I have to keep watching. I have to feel it all the to the end', he said. 'I don't need your help'.

Then he got up, and started to take his clothes off and skipped off to the bathroom.

Then he stumbled back in a moment later with his jumper wrapped tightly around his head.

Through mouthfuls of hoodie, a little voice said, 'I think I need your help now.'