Ruff-ing It

Television seems to be one of those necessary evils. Necessary, in the sense that it’s one of the only things that’ll keep Olivia’s prolonged attention, thus providing us with a break when needed; evil, in that it has sucked so much time from my life (and for me, it’s much easier to damn a box than myself). But I must say, if my daughter is going to sit in front of a television, I’d want her watching shows like “FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman,” her current fave.

“FETCH!” is a PBS show—it’s part game show, part reality TV, but 100% fun. The host is an animated dog named Ruff Ruffman, who sends each season’s six contestants on select tasks, each designed to educate while entertaining us viewers at home. (Our own Fetcher now complains of sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia when she gets an ice cream headache.) The creators of the show have expanded their enterprise to children’s museums around the country, and fortunately for us, a “FETCH!” lab has taken up residence in our local discovery museum, giving us a doggone good reason to renew our family membership.

On this day, Olivia and the lab assistants constructed flying apparatuses out of paper, paper clips, drinking straws, and tape.