The bigger picture of Sarah and Duck

We were looking through the children's programming on Neflix to find a show that we could use to wind down our toddler with. We saw that the British show Sarah and Duck was now on Neflix so we decided to try it out.

We has already been exposed to Sarah and Duck when we going through the programming on Sprout. (I am still sad that the Wiggles are no longer on Sprout) However, we hadn't really sat down and watched it, particularly not the way you do when you watch a block of episodes on Netflix.

Sarah and Duck is the quiet, dreamy adventures of a quirky little girl, her pet duck, a narrator who might be her dad and a neighborhood of eccentrics. It is more British than Doctor Who.

While we always found it charming, watching the episodes in order revealed to us that Sarah and Duck has an definite continuity with a focus on world building. Individual characters have introduction stories and later stories show Sarah's developing friendships with them. Locations are introduced and revisited.

Taken as one big arc, Sarah and Duck is the story of a little girl exploring the world around her and developing relationships with the people she meets. It is the story of her growing understanding and maturity.

Of course, at the same time, it is a cute little show for toddlers and preschoolers :)

We have had a pretty good run with Sarah and Duck. When dealing with a two-year-old, we know that his interest will wane and we will move on to a new show to relax and decompress him. But his parents are glad to have discovered how much creativity and imagination is really in Sarah and Duck.

How Chloe's Closet blew our minds

Over the last couple years, we have watched a lot of kiddy cartoons. It's a side effect of being parents and trying to figure out what we're okay with what our son watching.

And we have seen some strange ones. Although it's not like the cartoons of my childhood were that normal. A talking dog and some teenagers thwarting white collar criminals who insist on dressing up like monsters really doesn't sound like it came out of a rational mind.

So far, our single strangest experience has been Chloe's Closet. It didn't help that we missed the beginning of the first episode we watched. We found ourselves watching a trio of small children meeting a talking lion who was a wheelchair-bound paraplegic who was obsessed with frogs and also the king. They then proceeded to cheer him up teaching him about hip hop music. In this case, that means singing the words hip and hop to the tune of Old McDonald.

Absurd really doesn't cover it. To this day, that is the high water mark of bizarre for us.

Later, we learned that the premise of the show was that a little Welsh girl was playing pretend with her friends with a great big closet of dress up clothes. In other words, a world of talking animals and cars made out of craft supplies and tyrannosaur rexes on roller skates all makes perfect sense.

While we now understand why so many fantastic things are happening in Chloe's closet, and I do have to say that it does resemble the imaginary world that four -year-old might come up with, it is still a pretty strange place. Then again, a four-year-old's imagination.

It has not become a show that we watch on a regular basis, just on the odd occasion. However, I do like the idea of a pretend world where nothing is dangerous because a little girl wants it that way.

It's a gentle and harmless romp with a lot of creativity but we will never ever forget that first experience.I'm