As shouldn't be all too surprising, the highlight of Sesame Beginnings: Beginning Together for me personally was seeing Brandy and her adorable little girl Sy'rai interacting with each other.  The two are so charming together.  Brandy is a very devoted, patient, and loving mother, and it really shows in her daughter.  It's a profoundly beautiful thing to see.

The premise of Sesame Beginnings: Beginning Together is that we are seeing the Sesame Street™ characters Elmo, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Prairie Dawn, as infants.  The main feature consists of seven different activities, each of which is first introduced by Brandy and Sy'rai, then played out by muppets, interspersed with footage of other parent/child pairs engaged in the same activity.  The activities depicted represent simple ways of making everyday events and chores more engaging for infants.  Song is used to make the activities more interesting.

The DVD also features an introduction by Rosemarie T. Truglio (who holds a Ph.D. in child development), and several sections for parents.  One section describes the activities shown in the feature, and explains their relevance to child development.  Another section has constructive tips for parents.  Some will find these tips fairly obvious, but they're nevertheless important and certainly worth reiterating.  The information is presented in an entertaining format that resembles the feature itself.

There is a Spanish audio track in addition to the English.  There is also optional English captioning, and video description.  Note that (as seems to be very common in captioning in general,) the captioning isn't always word-for-word with the audio track.  (At times, whole sentences are omitted.)

Video description provides a voice-over which (very tersely) explains what is being shown in the video portion of the program.  The descriptions typically can't keep up with what's happening, and are typically truncated.  The usefulness of the video description is questionable - if anything, it serves as a beautiful demonstration of the fact that much of our communications as human beings is non-verbal.  All such subtle nuances will be lost to listeners not seeing the video program, even with the voice-overs.

In addition to appearing with Sy'rai, Brandy sings the presentation's theme song.  Brandy is utterly perfect for this score, being that she has a soft, pretty voice, which works wonders for a gentle song like this.

As with the song, everything about the presentation is, naturally, very gentle, brightly coloured, and all that other stuff babies love, lol.

If you have kids aged about six months to three years, Sesame Beginnings: Beginning Together would make a good buy.  You could also pick it up because you're crazy about Brandy; she does sing very nicely on it, and is utterly charming with her little girl.

Either way, you can feel good about buying Sesame Beginnings: Beginning Together, as the proceeds of sales of this and all products of Sesame Workshop are put back into providing educational programming for children throughout the world.