the pieces of my life

So I’m sure that everyone’s read by now that TV by babies watching causes ADD in children. “For every hour of television watched daily, two groups of children — ages 1 and 3 — faced a 10 percent increased risk of having attention problems at age 7.” Web sites about kids are proclaiming that allowing your young child to watch television is akin to child abuse. So what’s a beleaguered parent to do?

For the record, Doodles does not watch a lot of TV, although he does watch some. I have a few DVDs and videos (Baby Mozart, the colors and animals videos of Baby’s First Impressions, and a few Shalom Sesames), and he watches maybe one a week (sometimes not even that much–he hasn’t seen most of the Shalom Sesame tapes yet–they’re really for older kids, but I love the idea of them; it’s an Israeli-style Sesame Street in English). On a few rainy days when we were cooped up and I was losing it (mostly when Doodles has had one of his many colds), I have given up, sat down, and turned on the Teletubbies to watch with him. And honestly, Doodles attention span for kid shows is limited.

The problem we have is that TV season has officially started in our house. The series that Adam and I watch all come on at night after Doodles’s bedtime. No problem. And if they start earlier, well, that’s what our Replay is for. But I’m sure all of you know what time of year it is: baseball season. Which has the unfortunate problem of seguing directly into football season. And neither Adam nor I believe in Replaying sports. It’s simply wrong. So what’s a sports fan to do? Do we not watch our games? Will we be dooming our son to ADD if we have them on while we go about our business? Are we child abusers because we have Pedro on our TV instead of Pavarotti on our radio? Our living room is the center of our house, where we hang out, where we play, where we watch TV. Right now [editor’s note: this entry was actually written on Sunday], Adam is watching the end of the Red Sox game, and frankly, Doodles could not care less. He’s happily playing with his Roll & Rhyme Melody Block (which he now loves because he can finally get his little arms over it to turn it over) and ignoring the fact that his father is nervously watching Toronto and the Red Sox in overtime (yeah, yeah, “extra innings.” Whatever. When is Adam going to learn to love a real sport? Go Dolphins!) (And if Adam is this antsy in the first week of the season, how am I going to deal with him next September/October?) (Just to have one more random aside, did anyone else hear Frank Deford give his NPR commentary on how the Yankee/Red Sox rivalry really isn’t because the Red Sox suck? I found the commentary entertaining but Adam just kept stomping around muttering something like, “Stupid, stupid. What a ridiculous report,” although the words he used weren’t quite that nice. What really amused me, though, was that Deford completely disses the Red Sox and WGBH cuts directly from his commentary into our local pledge drive. Way to increase Boston support, NPR!)

So here are the things I need to worry about other than George Bush: improperly put-in car seats; Kawasaki Disease (I read two articles about it: one in the New Yorker and one in a back issue of Brain, Child); the state of our public schools; kidnapping; falls off the changing table; autism (which, until recently, large heads were thought to be a sign of); accidentally eating something with peanuts because the doctor told me that will make Doodles susceptible to peanut allergies; that my son will be gay and the Constitutional ban on gay marriage will be passed so he can’t get married to the person of his choice; did I start solids too early or too late, putting my child at risk of diabetes?; Doodles took antibiotics for an ear infection and for suspected pink eye so we’re already helping him on his way to developing drug-resistant infections; Doodles rolls over onto his stomach when he sleeps and what if the doctor is wrong about it being okay at this point?; we circumcised him so we scarred him for life; and vaccinations? Let’s not even start on the vaccination debate. And now? Well, now I have to worry that TV is going to seep into my little Doodles brain and make everything a mess.

Of course, this is but the tip o’ the iceberg. I worry about many, many more things. It was all on the paper I signed when I agreed to this motherhood thing. But the TV? Do I really need to stress out because we want (okay, Adam wants) the Red Sox on on a Sunday afternoon? Am I the only one out here who’s worked up over this?

I don’t normally take online quizzes. Life is simply too short. However, I was tempted by Daniella’s link to a grammar quiz. While this blog may not accurately represent my love of grammar (if I worried about grammar here, I’d never get anything posted), I do have a fetish for the particulars of the English language. So I took the test. And my title was broadly proclaimed on its site:

You are a GRAMMAR GOD! If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you! How grammatically sound are you? brought to you by Quizilla

Cool, I’m a Grammar God. I can live with that.

BUT (and there’s always a but isn’t there?) Adam put this nifty little program on my computer so that I can see my desktop computer on my laptop. This is helpful because there are plenty of times that Doodles is playing happily in the living room, but I’d like to answer e-mail, which is only on my desktop. This way I can work off my desktop while on my laptop (for you geeky folks, the program is Real VNC). Stick with me, there is relevance here. When Adam set it up, though, he also made it so my laptop could work off of his computer, for those days when he was too lazy to go get his laptop from his office downstairs. This afternoon, Doodles was happily jumping in his Jumperoo and both Adam and I were busy on our laptops (I was finally catching up on the blogs I like to read and Adam, most likely, was commenting on Sons of Sam Horn). I I.M.ed him the quiz link across the whole two feet separating us and he took the quiz. Just because I’m nosey, I decided to spy in on his computer to see how he was doing (with his permission, of course–because my computer will control his computer there’s no way for me to do it without his knowing about it). Oh, how gleefully I watched as he mixed up his “which” and his “that.” I giggled at his misunderstanding of the possessive with a final “s.” I felt superior as he mixed up his “I” and his “me.” And I waited for him to get back his final score–would he do well enough for an “average” or was he going to get “You are a complete and utter BASTARDIZATION of the English tongue!” But then it showed: Adam came up with Grammar God as well. I’m not saying I got all the answers right and he got them wrong. But I will say that on at least four out of twenty questions we differed in our answers. One of us is not a Grammar God. And I’m not naming names here, but someone ask Adam what a “misplaced modifier” is. Stupid quiz.

I really don’t have much to say this week. We had a guest in town from Seattle, which was fun. It’s always surprising to me who’s good with Doodles and who isn’t. I know some people who I would be sure would be fantastic with babies, but then they get near Doodles and they hold him at arm’s length, as if he smelled bad. (Okay, so odds are he does smell bad, but real baby people don’t mind.) (And for the record, I never say, “Do you want to hold Doodles?” I think that’s so rude. I never liked it when people asked me because you always felt like you had to say yes. If anyone asks though, I’m happy to hand the stink bomb over.) I wouldn’t have expected this friend to be particularly good with Doodles–really for no other reason than I’ve never seen him with a baby before–but he was great with him.

I wish I had something more exciting to report this week, but I really don’t. Sometimes it’s just like that.

The photo speaks for itself:

First it was the ears. I had to take Doodles in this week to have the wax cleaned out of his ears. It was not a pleasant trip. We had been putting drops in to help it along and then the doctor flushed the ears out with warm water. Poor Doodles. While there we went ahead and weighed and measured him to see if we can still use the infant seat. Sigh. The seat comes out this weekend. At 18 lbs, 14 oz, he’s still in the weight limits, but he’s finally hit 26 inches. He’s still the shortest guy in the gang, but he’s now officially too long for that seat. That means instead of just carrying the entire seat inside when he falls asleep in the car, we now will have to wake him to take him in because the seat doesn’t come out of the car.

And then I did it–I jinxed us. As we left the doctor’s office, I said to the office manager, “Well, hopefully we won’t have to see you until our nine month appointment!” She said, “I hope not!” Which means we can place the blame squarely on me for Doodles current mucous situation. Only one word can describe it: copious. It’s coming from his nose, we can hear it in his chest, it’s oozing out his eyes. My little wheezing weasel is leaving a trail of slime. I already called the doc’s office once and if he’s still a fountain of snot, we’ll be returning, not just before the nine month appointment, but within days of the last one. If we go in tomorrow, I’ll be sure to say, “See you next week,” in hopes of tricking the jinxster.

My peeps are looking out for me and sending me links to all the newest research. Gotta stay on the cutting edge of peepdom! Speaking of which, the magic that is Wilson Farms has a new offering: chocolate-covered peeps with sprinkles. The peeps are dipped, kind of like a strawberry, so half the peep is visible. It is such a beautiful thing. I can only be grateful that it’s Passover and I can’t Peeps, otherwise, I’d be one sick puppy right now.

After complaining to Doodles day care teacher about the cost of baby clothes (individually they’re not so bad, but the way Doodles spits up, he goes through a lot of outfits. Well, he goes through a lot of outfits at day care. At home, I let him just hang out in spit-up covered clothes). She suggested eBay. Duh! Why hadn’t I thought of that? I bought maternity clothes there; why not Doodles’ clothes? So I checked it out. I am an eBay machine. I spent $54.84 (that includes all shipping costs) for 49 pieces of clothing (no I did not have 49 auctions going; I bid on lots). And some of them are mighty fine! Of course, with my luck, Doodles will have a growth spurt before this lovely spring-like weather warms up and he’ll shoot right past these clothes, but, hey, if he can wear a quarter of them, we’ve saved a lot of money. I got the first batch today. Sooo cute!!

Something comes over me when I enter a Costco. I. Must. Have. Everything! There’s something innately satisfying about having a house of full of food and paper things. If a major blizzard hits, we’ll be fine, eating our canned tomatoes and pooping into our size 3 Cruiser diapers. Of course, if I limited my purchases to food and paper goods, we’d be in much better financial shape. But I get caught in the aisles. Swayed by the gleaming quanties. Seduced by the per item prices. So, I also purchased over 100 bulbs that I really will plant (no, really!) as soon as the rain stops. I bought a raft of wrapping paper that will come in handy, as we know a zillion babies who all have birthdays coming up. I have enough deodorant and laundry detergent to keep me smelling fresh into the next decade.

Now, the one thing I won’t buy at Costco is books. I’m morally opposed to buying books at Costco. However, when passing the book aisle, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a board book version of The Monster at the End of This Book. I had completely forgotten about this book! But my sister and I certainly read it, and of course, I had to buy it for Doodles. It was sealed in the store, but once we got home and I pulled off the plastic, I had an incredible sense of deja vu. How could I have forgotten this book? I hadn’t realized how great Grover is until I re-heard “Monster in the Mirror” and then re-read this book. What a powerful lesson Grover has for all of us. The metafictional way Grover so cleverly breaks the fourth wall and so clearly refers back to the text is obviously Sesame Street‘s way of introducing literary theory to the tot set. “Wubba wubba wubba wubba woo woo woo. That monster at the end of this entry, he just might be you!”

Speaking of Sesame Street, this year is the show’s 35th anniversary. I watched this show from the start. My father likes to say that the root of my woes is Sesame Street. He says that my mother went out one day in 1969 and heard about this fabulous new kids show called Sesame Street on PBS. My mom made sure I watched it the next day. However, the show was already on the letter B and the number 2, and my father says I never quite caught up. (I just discovered that SS was originally developed to “educate poor children who didn’t go to preschool.” What a way to find out my family was poor!) Anyway, if you started watching the show when I did, try your hand a the trivia game. I did fine on the old stuff, but didn’t know the answers to most of the new things. So much has changed on the Street; I watched just a bit the other day and I barely recognized the old neighborhood! You know, if they put old episodes of SS (and Zoom and Electric Company) on DVD, I bet it would become an instant kids’ bestseller as all us parents who grew up on the show buy the real episodes for our children to enjoy (and one of these days I’m going to splurge and get Doodles Songs from the Street: 35 Years of Music [side note: Ursula 1000 does a remix on this album. I went to high school with him! How cool! I wonder if he actually got to hang out with Big Bird and the gang]). In the meantime, I already have the Replay set to record the show’s 35th anniversary special so Doodles and I can watch it together. Mr. Hooper lives on in all of us.

I don’t have much to say about Doodles this week, because things have been going pretty smoothly. A quick trip to the doctor proved that nothing more than waxy ears was wrong with Doodles (they’re so waxy, in fact, that we have to put drops in twice a day for ten days and go back to have the ears cleaned out; that’s Adam’s child!). The doc said that perhaps Doodles doesn’t need as much sleep as we thought, and sure enough, we’ve been keeping him up a little later and he’s been sleeping better (read: longer). I think there’s some definite teething going on because there has been intermittent fussiness, and he’s back to chewing on everything in sight. We have mostly easy days, but there have been a few monster days as well (sometimes the monster at the end of the entry is Doodles. If you haven’t read the previous entries, that statement will mean nothing to you, but you’ll understand by the end of today’s blog).

Now, I promised I wouldn’t call Doodles the you-know-what baby ever. However, I will say that on Monday we were at the annual HBS Dean’s party for kids, and unsolicited, a guy came up to us (a first year volunteering to help out at the party) in this room filled with babies and kids, and gushed, “He is the cutest baby I have ever seen!” He went on and on about how wonderful Doodles is, and of course, Doodles was happy to comply and be happy and smiley and just gosh darn adorable. So, I no longer have to make proclamations of my child’s beauty. Others will do it for me!