Desperate Measures

My parents are coming tonight and my house is a DISASTER. You can't even walk into the spare bedroom where they're supposed to sleep. Every flat surface in the house is somehow covered in clutter again, despite the fact that I had them all cleared two days ago. Piper got shots on Wed. and has been extra clingy and hard to please ever since. I let her watch the tail-end of Word World on PBS Kids just so I can drink a cup of coffee and asses the mess without her wrapping herself around my legs and screaming.

I always swore I'd never let my kid watch TV until she was older; 2 at least. No way, nohow. I hated the idea of TV for little kids, just training legions of mini-zombies to be the couch-potato consumers of tomorrow. My kid wasn't going to turn out like that. Never mind my own tv-viewing, I would save my child! I thought I would, I don't know, jump in front of the screen or something if she tried to look.

But this is not the first time I have caved. I have been known to pop in my well-worn VHS copy of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine just to get twenty minutes of work-time. She is transfixed by it and will actually sit there quietly and watch, instead of screaming at me and tearing apart whatever I am working on. My kid, who won't even sit still long enough to have her diaper changed, sat in one place for twenty whole minutes.

I didn't intend to let her watch it today. I turned on the TV to find a local news program because of a text message Ryan sent me. It was already on PBS, Word World was on and some computer-generated frog was jumping around. Piper looked up from unloading a file box of our important financial papers and giggled. Then she took a toy and went into the living room and stood in front of the TV. When I went into the kitchen, she didn't follow me and demand "Up! Up!" I got to drink a whole glass of water with no baby-hands grabbing it. The possibility of actually getting something done at some point during the day danced tantalizingly in front of me.

But my glee was short-lived. The show ended and she went back to chasing the cats around and trying to poke them with a plastic fork. Guess I don't need to worry about creating a TV addict so much as an animal abuser.