history vs. the little cartoon girl

For those of you who don't already know yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day...

It's a holiday you know.

No, really it is, do you know how you can tell?  You get the day off school if you're a kid...  which means you're home with me... if you're K that is.

It also means sleeping in.  Oh heavenly heavenly sleeping in until 8:15.

(yes, 8:15 was the exact moment that K woke up).

I thought though that a day home from school and no mail wasn't a sufficient way to celebrate this day in our history so I decided that I would give K a bit of a history lesson and we would talk about what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had meant to the people of this country.

You see she was so horrified when she learned that we once had slavery in the this country.  She was so mortified when she learned that women and African Americans weren't allowed the same rights as Caucasian men.  She was so shocked when we explained to her that we were in the midst of our first presidential race where a woman and an African American actually had a real chance at becoming our President (she thought we'd had plenty of women as presidents and was somehow under the impression that MLK had been the president too, I think maybe she has him confused with JFK?).

I thought, given her interest in these areas in the past couple of months, she would be interested in learning more about the man we were celebrating.

I was wrong.  She wanted to watch TV that she doesn't normally get to watch while she's at school and that I don't TiVo for her...

Never the less I began to explain the Civil Rights Movement.  I tried to go about it gently.

Maybe gently was the wrong way to go about it.

Maybe I shouldn't have tried to be mild for her delicate 5 year old sensibilities... because instead of being enthused about her history lesson on the Civil Rights Movement she wanted to watch Dora the Explorer...

I had forgotten how much I hate that little cartoon girl...