Doctor Who & my daughter

This is an interesting post. As a sci-fi fan, I'm excited about it, but I'm more excited about my daughter reading. So here goes an odd one.

As I posted about back in May of 2006, Samantha seems to have inherited the sci-fi gene from Daddy. Now we don't actually show her full episodes of things, as most of it is too advanced for her, but she has seen a few minutes here and there. Enough that she can recognize "The Doctor" when I pause the TiVo and ask. David Tennant is "her Doctor", a term Dr Who fans will recognize. Anyway, as per the old blog entry, Samantha has always danced to the title sequence of (modern) Doctor Who. If I put it on, she gets all excited, and starts dancing around the floor. She seems to love it. I had it on tonight, and she started dancing around, only this time she shouted "DOCTOR WHO! IT'S DOCTOR WHO MOMMY!", which got both of us laughing. So she danced around a few more times, only in the middle of the title sequence, she said "Tardis!". For those who don't know, the Tardis is the blue box that is the Doctor's ship. Samantha recognized it, and pointed it out to us.

So we repeated the theme song a few times, and then stopped it on the logo in the titles, which I'm showing here.

She's 2 years 5 months, so we've been working on letters, alphabet, and rudimentary reading. She pretty much knows every letter of the alphabet, although she doesn't get it right 100% of the time yet. So when I paused it on the logo, I asked her "What are those letters?". She walked up to the TV, and read them in order.. D-O-C-T-O-R-W-H-O. That part was cool enough, but I took a step and asked "What does that spell?" I think we had to repeat the question a second time like "What do those letters say?", She said "Doctor Who!", which was a really cool moment. Lynn and I both laughed. Now, you could make the point that we were talking about Doctor Who anyway, and she just remembered it, but it seemed like she was reading it, which was cool to me on two levels - one as a parent, and two as a Doctor Who fan. So we repeated it again, and once she realized we were all happy, she got all excited about it, and started saying "Doctor Who!" several more times. BTW, she can also recognize a Dalek on screen too.

A little setup for the second part of this. I work for a game company, and as such, it allows me to continue to act like a kid myself into my 40's. I have quite a few toys on my desk at work, including a decent collection of Doctor Who toys. This past Friday I got two more things in, one was a fairly large (about a foot tall) replica of the Tardis. It's the current "hot toy" in Doctor Who fandom (it's really a Flight Control Tardis for any Who fans reading this). I had brought it home to show Lynn, and brought home a couple of the relevant figures to stand with it. When Lynn called the stuff "Daddy's toys", Samantha immediately wanted to play with them, saying things like "Daddy share his toys with Samantha!". I was a little leery of that, as I had visions of the Tardis exploded on our living room floor. I stuck the Tardis and the figures in our entertainment center for the weekend, and Samantha would point at them saying "Those are Daddy's toys!". Well, after the stuff I described above with the reading of the Doctor Who logo, I decided to let her hold the Tardis for a bit. I grabbed the camera (mostly because a friend Jake would love seeing the pics), so I snapped a few of her with the Tardis toy. It was quite cute actually, as the prop looks even larger with a two year old holding it. So after she held that for a bit (and figured out how to open the doors on her own), I took it back and let her play with the action figures a bit. When she was sitting there, I decided to push my luck and grab some of the Doctor Who DVD's off the shelf from previous Doctors and ask her who they were. She recognized David Tennant easily enough on TV, but the concept of other guys being "The Doctor" probably is foreign to her. I picked up a DVD from the original Doctor from 1963, an older fellow named William Hartnell. Asked her who that was, and she said "The Doctor". Showed her one from the sixth actor in the role during the 80's, Colin Baker. She also said he was "The Doctor". I just smirked at that, and decided it was time to end the Doctor WHo stuff, as she needed to get ready for bed.

While this is mostly a Doctor Who-centric post, I do have to admit to thinking it was very cool that my two year old daughter was able to read "Doctor Who" off the television. But the inner geek in me was loving the fact that my daughter also exclaimed "I love Doctor Who!" tonight.

Somewhere I see Jake & Lina smiling over reading this, too. :)