Dora the Demon

Dora the Explorer scares the crap out of me.

There. I said it.

The television show itself is harmless. Libby likes to watch it, and has learned enough Spanish to be able to tell me what color ‘la manzana’ is (roja!), but fortunately not enough to know what that lady keeps yelling at her kid in the parking lot at Chick-fil-A.

For her part, Dora is a smart little cookie… an adventurer… dare I say it? ‘A wise Latina’… hollah, Judge Sotomayor.

And her monkey? Boots? Well, with his knee high red leather boots, he’s always clapping, singing & dancing at the end of every episode like it’s his own personal Broadway show. Yep, while Reverend Falwell was ‘outing’ Teletubbies, Boots the Monkey escaped the clutches of the Grumpy Old Troll (hmm… I *do* see the similarities) and was even singing about it… ‘Lo hicimos…We did it!’

I mean… I’m just sayin’.

So I’m cool with the show…what I am referring to is the demonic looking giant Dora head on the side of my bathtub.

For some inexplicable reason, we got this for Libby for Christmas last year (another of those drunken eggnog moments, I guess), and it has been freaking me out nightly ever since.

For starters, Dora is just a head and torso. That, in and of itself, is a wee bit freaky. You’re supposed to wash and style her hair with the little comb. Libby, however, prefers to make her ‘swim’ in the tub, pulling her through the water like some unfortunate shark attack victim.

Secondly, this sucker is big… we’re not talking some petite little doll. Her head is easily the size of a cantaloupe, and she has long dark hair (all the better to get synthetic hair clogged in my drain!)

She originally came with suction cups to hook onto the the side of the tub. And can I just tell you? There’s nothing like the thud of a head in the bathtub at 2 in the morning to just ruin a good night’s sleep.

So we took off the suction cups, and there she sits on the side of my tub, startling me on my walk to the potty in the middle of the night. A head silhouetted in the moonlight. *shiver*

Why not just move her? Frankly, I’m a little afraid that if I do, I’ll forget that I did. And in the middle of the night, my sleep-addled brain will be unable to remember whether I moved the doll… or if…*gulp*…it moved itself.

I saw a movie like that once, and to be honest, I wouldn’t put it past her. Dora…Chucky’s crazy@$$ bilingual cousin.

She will cut you.