Who Let The Dogs Out?

I've never seen Will laugh so hard. It's a good thing he wasn't drinking milk at the time because he would surely have had it coming out of his nose. The kids have been watching Rugrats In Paris.. silly movie but the six year old seems to like it.. and there is tolerance on the part of the other two.. so it gets played at least once a day for the last week, it would seem. Within the movie there are several high energy songs.. somebody obviously spent a considerable effort assembling the soundtrack for this little kids film, and this is a major motivating factor in me putting the movie on. One of the songs is Baha Men's Who Let The Dogs Out. On the DVD they included the video for the song as an extra. So there's been exposure to this song over the last week. No harm done.

Enter youtube. Tonight the kids were browsing for WordGirl and Cyberchase episodes and it occurred to me that the video for Who Let The Dogs Out must be somewhere on youtube.. after all.. just about everything can be found on youtube these days. So I ran the search and sure enough a couple of options came up front and center. One of them was obviously done by someone who doesn't understand what an aspect ratio is and how to set one correctly when producing analog to digital conversions and so I moved on to the other video that was near the top that appeared to fill the screen completely. Little did I realize at the time why the time of the video was less than the other.. but the artisan who produced this video had selectively sped up the audio on select areas of the video. So, unsuspecting, we begin to watch and ignore the horrible video quality.. but the audio plays fine and on it goes. Then the chorus hits and all of a sudden "who let the dogs out" is being questioned by none other than the Chipmunks. I thought it mildly amusing but this little four year old boy laughed harder than I've ever seen him laugh at anything before. We just had to run it a few more times.. but it's easily been an hour since the last play and he's still wandering around the house laughing out loud and giggling about the whole thing.. and singing the chorus on his own between fits of laughter. If you haven't played this for your kid you must try it. They deserve to laugh that hard too. Look for the version published by dohnut10.

Subtitles

I recently attended a meeting sponsored by my school district, the point of which is to provide me with the tools, materials and expertise to have my child ready to enter Kindergarten. It would seem many children fall well below the "average" upon entry to Kindergarten and those who enter below tend to stay below their classmates until much later in their school career. So they're trying to get these kids to enter at an average level or above in order to give them an edge for their entire school run, not just Kindergarten. At this meeting the topic of subtitles came up and I commented about how great I thought they are and how they can really help someone struggling to learn a language. I got a couple of strange looks but I think I made my point. But you likely weren't there so I will reiterate. These kids ARE learning another language.. the language of verbal communication. My son at least is very capable of reading the subtitles that scroll across the bottom of his favorite movies and he definitely uses them to help him understand what's going on. My other 2 kids have to suffer through them but I secretly hope that perhaps just a smidgen of the information there will rub off and help them to become better readers. So.. if you can.. turn on those subtitles!