Is this how Jane Fonda started? Because I'm okay with it, if that's the case.

Today's instance of hilarity ensuing had to do with my yoga mat. For some bizarre reason, possibly Sesame Street induced, Charlotte calls it an "octagon." Anyway, the last two days Charlotte has been very intrigued by the yoga mat, and asking me to unroll it so she can use it. Yesterday we did some Winnie the Pooh up-and-down excersizes, and she kept bending over and "go sideways." Today she turned into a tiny Aerobisize instructor:

"Up and down, Mama, up and down!"
"Do jumping! Jump, Mama!"

I showed her a few more things, some arm and neck stretches, hip twists, and up-to-the-sky stretches. This so delighted her that I actually had to roll up the yoga mat and put it away so that we could stop "stretchin'" and move on with our lives. My sister Nicole and my nephew G came over for a visit, and I told her about it. Nicole thought it sounded so funny that she wanted a demonstration. "Good luck with that," I said. Auntie Nicole spent the next five minutes at the whims of the tiny dictator.

"Onnie Nicole, uppa sky! Down, uppa sky!"
"Stretchin' you arms, Onnie, stretchin' you arms!"

Nicole then showed Charlotte a couple modified yoga moves (one is that you hold lay on your stomach and hold yourself up on your arms so that you look like a seal) that she used to do with her third-grade class, and Charlotte ate them up. Charlotte also started doing "fallin' down," which means lay on your back and breathe deeply. This is the point at which I realize that Charlotte must have seen a yoga class on TV somewhere and has taken it upon herself to teach us that we must all have quiet meditation at the end of our workout.

This is seriously one of the randomest funniest things that Charlotte has started doing in a list of random funny things - but there's this kind of creepy undercurrent of how just seeing something a couple times on TV has made this deep impression on her. I'm really struggling with making sure that she watches less TV vs. getting more work done vs. Charlotte begging to watch "mo dye-saur twain." It's probably the singlemost guilty conscience thing I have going on.

Well, that and all the goldfish crackers.