When my best friend becomes my worst enemy...

I love Netflix. In fact, the love that my husband and I have for Netflix is so great that we canceled regular cable (minus my Internet because I don't want to have withdrawal symptoms) and only watch shows or movies on the Netflix Instant Queue and the occasional movie that comes in the mail. We have been able to catch up on old shows that haven't been on the air in years and my husband is able to find old 80's "classics" with which to force upon share with me given my apparent negligence in staying on top of pop culture through ancient media.

Netflix has also afforded us a large amount of help with the children. They are both much like me in that they get desperately attached to a particular thing for a few months, and then never bother with it again. For them, this is often television shows. For two months, the only thing they wanted to watch was Dora the Explorer. My reservations with Dora aside, I find it infinitely preferable to SpongeBob SquarePants, which in my mind is the toddler equivalent of The Simpsons - disgusting, irreverent, and completely inappropriate for minds too immature to recognize certain subjects as jokes. Fortunately, on Netflix we are able to keep the first three seasons of Dora at our fingertips and easily start an episode when I am going out of my mind completely exhausted and need them to just sit down for a few minutes. After Dora was a fairly natural progression to Diego. Currently, they are completely in toddler-love with Scooby Doo.

Unfortunately, they are also completely enamored by an old 80's cartoon called "Ghostbusters". When we first found the show by chance while searching through cartoons, we found ourselves curious, immediately bringing to mind the beloved movies with the catchy theme song that we all rollerskated to back in "the day".

This cartoon is nothing like that.

I can't write the show off for being inappropriate and justify never letting the  kids watch it again, it's just irritating. Every time I watch it, I think I lose brain cells. It's entirely possible that this is because I am a huge fan of the original movies, and this cartoon seems like the worst possible thing that could have sprung forth as a result. But the kids LOVE it. And every time we turn the TV on they are hollering "Ghostbusters!". Considering the speech problems that X-Ray has, the fact that he asks for any show by name is enough to make me melt.

I'm glad my i-Pod has really good earphones.

:: sigh ::