Bamboozled By The Baby

We caught the little rugrat red handed. She was inching closer and closer to the trash with her clutched fist outstretched. Inside the thief's hand were my keys and her goal was to properly dispose of them.

In and of itself it's just another night in parenthood but for our family this week, it's much more. For the last week and a half our living room satellite dvr remote has been missing. I had, as always, set it down on the arm of the chair when Joshua and I went to bed. Of course since I was the last to have it, I'm the one responsible (blah, blah, blah) and I must have forgotten what I really did with it.

Whatever.

At lunchtime the next day, I begged Joshua to check the trash-which he had diligently taken out before we knew the remote was missing. I knew the trashman was on his way and to his credit, Joshua did at least a superficial exam of the bag but he didn't see it so we assumed it was still in the house. 

For the record, I'm not a great fan of housekeeping but my house is clean and organized so after not finding that darned remote for over a week coupled with the circumstantial evidence of tonight's attempted key-trashing, we're convinced the little one did it.

To be honest, not being able to watch TV in the living room other than movies on the Bluray didn't totally suck. It meant no TV cartoons. It meant no cartoon channel commercials. It meant less time in front of the TV as a family. Something else I've noticed, our son's attitude has been better. It didn't seem to matter that the shows we allowed him to watch were age and topic appropriate. Shows that had a good message-a moral message often did so by introducing a negative concept first. For example, Phineas and Ferb (love me some Phineas and Ferb, don't get me wrong) introduces concepts like bullying in an attempt to explain to children how to avoid  or even put an end to it. Well, since our kids are homeschooled and still young, bullying isn't a concept they've ever had to encounter and quite honestly, I'd rather they stay ignorant and innocent of such things as long as possible. In my opinion, naivete is under-appreciated.

Before you start rolling your eyes because I'm turning into one of those organic food lovin', anti-TV, homeschooling moms, keep in mind that turning the TV off was the last thing I wanted but it seems to be working out to be one of the best things for our kids and that's all any parent wants.

Will we stop watching TV altogether? HECK NO. TV helped me stay sane during deployment.

Will the children ONLY be allowed to watch movies? Probably not. Maybe. For now, yes.

Do we have a problem with other people watching TV? Not at all. If your kids are less sensitive to it, I applaud you (and am a little jealous). 

Will our children be allowed to watch TV at their friends' houses? Of course. We have rules for our home. We have friends who have different rules and that's ok too...as long as we agree on the big issues.


So that's how our one-year old bamboozled us into turning the TV off and we're good with it...although I ordered a replacement remote tonight, just in case (besides the living room TV is bigger than our bedroom one and the kids do go to bed before us).