I Heart Dora

Jackson loves, loves, loves Dora the Explorer. We try not to go crazy on character merchandise, but when you see how excited your kid gets about a cookie shaped like his favorite character, it's hard to resist. Unfortunately, most Dora stuff is sort of, well, pink. And our efforts at trying to get Jackson to convert his affections to Diego (Dora's male cousin) have been met with an underwhelming response. But we've managed to secure some good Dora loot for him anyway like this....

Yes, that's a can of Dora corn in there. How can you resist a character that promotes corn?! So anyway, about a month ago we were getting ready to make a cross country trip to visit my parents, and we decided to get Jackson his own backpack to carry his toys. We took him to Target and Matt picked out two options and I brought Jackson over to let him choose (this, by the way, was our fatal mistake). He was diligently trying to decide which very manly backpack he wanted, when his eyes happend to travel upwards and land on...







...a giant pink Dora backpack! "Dora!" he exclaimed, quickly losing all interest in the manly backpacks. Matt and silently locked eyes. This was a critical moment in our parenting career. We are, after all, psychologists. Of course we don't want to promote gender discrimination and our kid should be who he wants to be, right? I caved in first. "Jackson," I lied, "those backpacks aren't for sale. They're just to look at." "Yes!" Matt shouted with a sigh of relief, "Now how about a nice Diego backpack?" Let the gender stereotyping begin!