Renzo say~~ "AMIGO!!"

3 weeks ago, I made a trip to Kiddy Palace, in order to find "Henry Number 3" train for Renzo as my mother-in-law promised to get it for his collection. But too bad, it seems that "Henry" is never popular enough to be even manufactured, and I ended up reaching home with an episode of "Dora the explorer" for little Renzo, without much knowledge about Dora's episodes, I grabbed their 10 years anniversary edition that lasts for more than one and half hours long, which obviously, is a brilliant choice!!

Renzo has been spending quite a good portion of his playtime at home watching TV, well we all know how bad it is but then, since he only has interest in his Leapfrog educational DVD, and occasionally that one piece of Thomas and Friends disc, we are not limiting his TV time as we could see that he's benefiting a lot in terms of building up his knowledge on alphabets, phonics, numbers and musics. Thus we become very careful and selective when it comes to introducing programs to him on TV. Basically we do not allow him to watch anything airing on TV except for a 10-20 minutes animal planet program once in a while, no cartoons, no news, no entertainment and no movie series of course.

We've learned about Dora series during our last holiday trip to China. There's a Chinese version of Dora speaking mainly Mandarin but teaching one or two words in Spanish along the way. Renzo did not show much interest at that time (maybe because it's not in a language that he's familiar with), but I was completely impressed as this little girl is always trying to find something to help somebody in every episode, and there's active participation required from the viewers to help her with her adventures.

Renzo absolutely enjoyed his new disc and requested to watch it almost everyday. (Finally we could give Tad, Professor Quigley and Mr Websley of the LeapFrog series a break!!), and he's almost forgotten that one and only one piece of Thomas and Friends disc which is an absolute great news to us, since we never found it to be educational or interactive.

On week 1: Renzo was excited to meet his new Amigos: Dora, Boots the Monkey, Swiper the Fox, Dora's Backpack, the Map, Isa the Iguana, Tico the squirrel, Benny the Bull and Fiesta the Trio! And he started to dance around the house when the music starts "Come on, vámonos. Everybody let’s go!!". He also learned his first few Spanish words: Azul (blue), Amarillo (yellow), Rojo (red)..... and yes.. that is pronounced as ro-ho, not ro-joe.

On week 2: He dreamt of Dora on 2 consecutive nights. How did we know? Well he dream talked "Dora and the monkey!!", "The little pig is on the tree top!!" and "Swiper no swiping!!". We could immediately relate as those are the scenes screened in Dora's show. And it's so enjoyable to see him interacting with Dora and other characters, majority of the time, he could give the right answers to the questions asked promptly.

On week 3: He's now trying to explain the story to his grandpa, by pointing out things like which path to follow in order to get to the destination, where are the missing animals hiding, and shouting "Swiper no swiping" at the right time to stop the Fox from stealing things. I am sure he could recite some scripts from this show by now.

There's this one scene that Dora helped the lost Baby Blue Bird find her mummy at the Little Blue Tree, and when the Baby Blue Bird shouted "Mama!!", Renzo said, "Ooo, it's so cute!!" That moment our hearts were melting!!

And there's one night before he put on his red pajamas, he insisted to wrap it around his neck and told us, "Because, the super map is like that!!". Win joked that it is Renzo's first cosplay, but this little boy's creativity is definitely beyond our imagination.

Now the next thing I am wondering is, should I get the Chinese version of Dora the Explorer disc for Renzo? Maybe his Mandarin could improve tremendously with the help of his Amigos??!!!