My kid loves Martha Stewart

Martha had a "Good things and Bad Things" Halloween Special on, and my kid got hooked. I don't know how many times she has watched it, but I know I personally have it memorized. Eyeball, Highball. That's where you take radishes, shave them and inset olives into a little scooped out section, then freeze them in ice cube trays. Julia went out to the garden and pulled out every last radish then started an assembly line. She was so excited about her radish eyeballs--which, by the way--start to stink after a few hours in a glass of water. Yuck. Martha doesn't tell you that stuff.

Then there is the pumpkin snake. Martha gets a billion pumpkins--probably from her own garden--and assembles them in a huge snake like pattern with a serpent head at the front, lights strung throughout. Pretty cool, only, when we went to the store to get some pumpkins, they were all sold out. Julia was bummed out about that for awhile.

Now Martha has a Thanksgiving special with a Christmas one to follow. I like Martha Stewart, I really do, but I don't know if I can stand two more months of her telling me how to make the perfect this or perfect that. And my kid, isn't she just being set up to believe in a perfect world where everything is stainless steel and shiny mint green? Life isn't like that. Perfection is hard earned; you either spend all your time keeping it up--which will eventually lead to an early death or time in prison--or, you give up early and live the rest of your life talking to rats. I like rats.

I think most people watch Martha and think, "Nice, but no one's going to do it like that." It's like watching Michelangelo do a sculpture, then saying, "And now I'm going to make a play-doh puppy dog." It's a healthy way to participate. We watch Martha in awe, she's a fem-bot of crafts. No one is going to achieve her greatness. But . . . a kid, they don't know that. They're sponges. My Julia will watch Martha fifty million times and in two years be able to cook a truffle souffle for lunch. Hey, this might be good. I guess . . . I'll let her watch the show a few more times.