Specific sound of festive refrigerator (10)

Stop being so picky, Nation. That's why you're still single.
-- Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report (February 14, 2006)
Neva has a reward system using "tokens" (poker chips) to encourage behaviours that we like to reinforce. When she does something good, she gets a token, and when she gets the right number of tokens, she can cash them in for a reward. Here's the menu:

1 red token	box lunch upgrade (Dora fruit chewies and crackers)
3 black tokens	pancakes with chocolate chips (available on Saturdays)
7 blue tokens	video rental of her choice

She gets a red token for eating the "healthy" parts of her lunch (protein and carrots), a black token for me reading her bedtime story (the point being to save Cheryl from doing it seven out of seven nights), and a blue token every morning she wakens without having wet the bed (the point, obviously, being giving her an incentive to stay dry at night). The red tokens have had intermittent success; usually the day she gets extras, she gorges on those and doesn't eat her main course. Usually I get three stories per week (no more, no less), and in the past couple weeks, she hasn't wet the bed at all.

Yesterday was a busy day. I made pancakes but without chocolate chips. In a rare exception, I hadn't read three stories to Neva this week (working Monday night, babysitter Tuesday while Cheryl and I had our dinner out, over at Huss and Sarah's on Wednesday, and by Thursday, there weren't enough days left to get up to three, so Neva didn't choose me any nights). Neva had managed to accumulate a strong cache of blue tokens, and Cheryl had anticipated her interest in spending them, having secured a copy of Barbie and the Magic of the Pegasus, along with some Backyardigans DVDs I wanted to complete our collection. Unfortunately, I think that the excitement for Neva is maybe as much in the choosing as the watching. She wanted to choose a different video, and they were her tokens that she was spending...

Cheryl and I needed ingredients for a salad for a lunch (we were joined by Katelyn), and for cookies for a potluck (we were to join Roy and Meredith at their place for a farewell dinner for Nicole, one of our Student Health colleagues). Neva joined along on the grocery run and chose a Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses DVD. She ended up watching the video in the morning yesterday and is watching it again today. Although not a Disney movie, the presentation follows in the Disney tradition of co-opting an original fairy tale in the public domain, (this time changing the story significantly) and infusing it with the values of the filmmakers (in this case, that the princesses should be named alphabetically (Genevieve is the seventh sister, G is the seventh letter - incidentally, the same way Omar names his cars), and also that princesses should be even more dysmorphic than the original Barbie). Why the hero would be a parrot guy is beyond me. Why the parrot has an Indian accent is inexplicable.

Cheryl and I are grudging consumers of Barbie products, but Neva seems to like it.