"It's for the show..."

Natalie does this very funny (I know, all parents think their kids are hilarious…) dance where she imitates one of the Peanuts characters from A Charlie Brown Christmas. She closes her eyes, snaps her fingers, shakes what her mama gave her and flips her hair from side to side.

I told her that I wanted to record an HD video of her to send to her Nanay and she immediately asked, “Are you gonna put in on YouTube so that I can be on America’s Funniest Home Videos and win $10,000?” Not exactly the response I had imagined and I immediately got the “Where did my parenting skills veer so off course?” ache in my stomach. It is times like these that make me think that the age of YouTube has created a generation of kids whose sense of reality is so off kilter you are tempted to unplug the TV and the computer and throw them out the window.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last few weeks, the latest reality TV cautionary tale has played itself out in the news under the name The Balloon Boy Hoax. The nationally covered circus has not only given the wing-nut father the notoriety that he so desperately wanted (I nearly stabbed my eardrum with a pencil when I heard his self written/producer/performed theme song for his proposed reality show), but reduced his little boy to the puke on camera sensation that was interrogated by Wolf Blitzer in the SITUATION ROOM! His parents hatched a plan to their American Dream by creating a giant ghetto Mylar balloon, faking a call to 911 and forcing their kid to lie about it. Only in America.

Maybe it is I that is out of touch. Perhaps the living in reality ship has sailed and I am left on a deserted island of desired normalcy.