Dolly Parton's Otters

Yesterday we came home and there was only one thing in the mailbox -- a book. This is not unusual as Gavin and Bode are both registered members of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, a free program that sends one book per month to children from birth until age 5. In 2010, the program distributed 7.1 million books to kids in the United States, Canada and Great Britain! If your kids aren't already signed up for this program, you can register here.

Getting a book in the mailbox has become quite an event. Gavin loves flipping the book over to see if it is his name or Bode's, and it seems recently he actually finds more joy in being able to hand the book over to Bode. G absolutely adores his little brother.

This book was his own however. Normally we would have to immediately read the book, but yesterday's book, Take Care, Good Knight, had some competition because we had just come from the library where we checked out Gavin's favorite book, One Witch, for the seventeenth time (after the first 10, I think the library should just give it to you).

Every time he gets a book from Dolly though, I think back to A Lot of Otters. This was not only the worst book ever sent to us from Dolly, it may be THE WORST BOOK EVER WRITTEN (and that includes this gem). See for yourself in the video below:

Now, the part I didn't show in the video is that this book was dedicated To Pat, who I can only assume was Barbara Helen Berger's crack dealer. No one in a sober mind sits down and writes a book for kids that shows a baby in a cardboard box floating in the ocean. It also expects me as a parent to comforted by the fact that he was safe with a lot of cute, cuddly otters.

How cute and cuddly are otters? I did the research and not only have there been 39 otter attacks on humans, but an otter actually ate a dog in 2001 in Florida. It's supposedly (or "supposably" for the high-school-age crowd reading this) okay though because otters only attack if they are rabid or need to protect their pups. Isn't it reasonable to assume that if there are, and I quote, "a lot of otters," that there is a pretty good chance that one might have rabies or pups? In fact, the cover of the book shows an otter holding onto a pup!

I'm two paragraphs into the analysis now and I haven't even touched on the fact that these otters "taste" the star-tears of Mother Moon and rub them all over their bodies. I'm going to leave that one alone even though I would like to do a Tosh-style video breakdown of those couple of pages.

After reading some reviews on Amazon, most people think this is a lovely story about the fact that it is okay to be separated and no matter where you are, your mother is with you. I think that there are a lot of people who missed the "This is your brain on drugs" commercial during all those ABC after-school specials.