A Mommy Story

Last night the Wiggles were in Columbus, and Aaron and I took Cordy to see her favorite boy band. We went to the show last year, also, when Cordy was just 11 months old, but we figured she would probably have more fun this year.

During the morning we got her psyched up for the show. “Cordy, tonight you get to see the Wiggles!” “Weee-gils!” she’d exclaim in return. She spent the day with my friend L. and her son B., and then we all met up at Nationwide Arena for the concert.

The concert was fantastic! Once again, we had seats fairly close to the stage on the left hand side. The place was packed with exasperated parents and overexcited toddlers and preschoolers. Cordy wanted to climb up and down the arena stairs, so we had to sandwich her in between us to keep her from disappearing.

If you’ve never been to a Wiggles concert before, I have to tell you, it’s worth the ticket price for the show. It’s clear these guys really love kids. In a 15,000 person arena, they do as much as possible to make sure that every kid feels like they got a little special treatment.

At one point, they were pointing to and reading homemade signs in the audience, thanking the children for their signs and drawings. They also asked who was celebrating a birthday that day, and mentioned 7 kids and one adult by name when singing Happy Birthday.

Everyone but Greg (who is the lead singer) goes out into the audience at some point, even going way up into the cheap seats to collect drawings, roses for Dorothy the Dinosaur, and bones for Wags the Dog. They donate all of the flowers to the local children’s hospital after the show, and all of the bones collected go to the local dog pound. They never refuse a picture.

I’m proud to say that this year we managed to get all four of them to make eye contact and wave at us at some point during the show. Cordy started to get tired about halfway through the show, and while I was waving to Jeff (the sleepy, purple Wiggle), he waved back, and noticed that Cordy wasn’t waving (I was trying to get her to wave to him). I picked up her hand and waved it for her, and he got a big laugh from it.

And they don’t disappoint the parents, either. Murray at one point told the crowd he needed to tune his guitar, and without any fanfare started playing “Stairway to Heaven” as his warm-up, prompting laughter and applause from the parents.

Oh, and for the moms out there who think Anthony is hot? Ladies, I got to touch the man. Seriously. We had a rose left over by accident (yes, by accident, I swear!), and when he came over to our section to collect bones for Wags, I handed him the rose, joking that we thought Wags deserved roses as well. I can now say, conclusively, he’s just as good looking and sweet up close.

Cordelia liked seeing her heroes, although just like last year we had trouble getting her to watch the show. There are large video screens on either side of the stage, and she generally preferred to watch the video screens. Apparently telling Cordy that we’re going to see the Wiggles tonight translates to watching a video to her. We had to keep turning her head and telling her, “No, Cordy, you don’t need to watch them on TV. Look, they’re right in front of you!“ It’s like she had trouble accepting they could be right there, in the flesh.

We did learn that Halloween may be a little troublesome this year. At one point, the backup dancers came out dressed as animals (a monkey, an elephant, and a tiger), and Cordy freaked out when she saw them. She wasn’t scared of anything else in the show, but the large animals dancing around on stage sent her burrowing her face into my chest with a wail.

Not only was she tired, but the tooth she’s cutting at the moment is giving her hell. At one point I looked in her mouth, and the tissue around the tooth was bloody. No wonder she was in such a grumpy mood.

We couldn’t leave without souvenirs, of course. The wait to buy them, however, was obscene. When I finally got to the front of the line, I asked for a white t-shirt in an extra small, only to be told small was the smallest size they had in any of the t-shirts. A small is a child’s 6-7. I looked at the woman behind the counter and said, “You do realize toddlers and preschoolers are the target demographic, right?” She gave me a helpless look and replied that they no longer had any of the smaller sizes. I made the suggestion that perhaps they need to carry fewer large sizes and more smaller sizes. So we got a small t-shirt (or nightshirt, depending on how you look at it right now), and a Captain Feathersword hat.

When we got home, Cordy didn’t fight the bedtime routine at all. She let us change her into her PJs, grabbed Blue, and stood in front of the stairs, waiting for me to take her up to bed. I know she probably won’t remember the show, but I’m glad the Wiggles put on such a fun, entertaining show for all of us.