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Our spectacular troubles yesterday morning were followed by a very, very long day of whining, crying, coughing, nose-running, general patheticness, and the, uh, incapacitation of two more pairs of pajamas. She napped for a grand total of half an hour and then woke herself with a coughing fit and couldn't get back to sleep, despite her obvious exhaustion.
I grew tenser and tenser as my own bedtime approached, anticipating an awful night. I channeled my anxiety into preparation, loading the diaper bag with two kinds of medicine (Advil and Triaminic, each loaded into an exterior bottle pocket with the appropriate dose-measuring device), two spare sleepers, two crib sheets, a change of clothes for me, an extra pacifier, water, diapers... everything I could think of that I might need to handle a middle-of-the-night sick toddler. I had already piled clean cloth diapers (our standard mop-up tool) next to the rocking chair in her room.
What happened? She slept through from 7:30 to 6:30, and woke up cheerfully demanding apple juice. She ate a decent breakfast. She was a little bit dismayed to discover that yesterday's unlimited-TV policy[1] had been rescinded, but mostly she bounced around playing. As she and Michael chauffeured me to work, she kept up a constant stream of song requests: "How about 'Little Cabin in the Woods?' How about 'Eensy-Weensy Spider'? Alex have a tiny spider."
Behold the two-year-old's amazing powers of recuperation!
[1] Yesterday she watched so much TV that I sort of expected to see her brain leak out her ears right then and there. Two episodes of "Sesame Street Old School," an episode of Blue's Clues, and two half-hour Disney Sing-Along videos, for a grand total of 3 1/2 hours of TV. She was pretty much too sick to play or go outside, all day long, so we read every single book in the house (I even volunteered, out of parental sympathy and desperation to entertain her, to read all the ones that she loves and I hate) and filled up the rest of the time with what felt like a ridiculous amount of television.
So I was a little bit shocked, this morning, to Google and find that the average American child aged 2-17 watches an average of 3 1/2 hours of TV a day. I'm not anti-TV - Alex usually watches a half-hour to an hour a day, and I often watch an hour or two myself after she goes to bed. Most of the research I've seen that condemns TV as a medium is scientifically suspect. I don't want Alex watching commercials or age-inappropriate programming[2], but I don't lose sleep over an hour of vegging-out screen time in the middle of a day packed with developmentally rich activities. But 3 1/2 hours? More than a quarter of a preschooler's waking time? Every single day? Tests my resolution not to be judgmental about other people's parenting choices.
[2] My definition of age-inappropriate programming seems to be a lot broader than most people's. I don't want my two-year-old watching plots about romance/falling in love/getting married; children experiencing loss of, or prolonged separation from, their parents; people being evil and/or wanting to harm other people; or people or animals dying. None of those things are normal concerns of a two-year-old, with the exception of parental separation - a normal anxiety I don't want to feed by exposing her to examples of severe and prolonged separation. These objections pretty much rule out the entire Disney oeuvre, and yet the preschool years are supposed to be the height of love for Disney feature films.
I grew tenser and tenser as my own bedtime approached, anticipating an awful night. I channeled my anxiety into preparation, loading the diaper bag with two kinds of medicine (Advil and Triaminic, each loaded into an exterior bottle pocket with the appropriate dose-measuring device), two spare sleepers, two crib sheets, a change of clothes for me, an extra pacifier, water, diapers... everything I could think of that I might need to handle a middle-of-the-night sick toddler. I had already piled clean cloth diapers (our standard mop-up tool) next to the rocking chair in her room.
What happened? She slept through from 7:30 to 6:30, and woke up cheerfully demanding apple juice. She ate a decent breakfast. She was a little bit dismayed to discover that yesterday's unlimited-TV policy[1] had been rescinded, but mostly she bounced around playing. As she and Michael chauffeured me to work, she kept up a constant stream of song requests: "How about 'Little Cabin in the Woods?' How about 'Eensy-Weensy Spider'? Alex have a tiny spider."
Behold the two-year-old's amazing powers of recuperation!
[1] Yesterday she watched so much TV that I sort of expected to see her brain leak out her ears right then and there. Two episodes of "Sesame Street Old School," an episode of Blue's Clues, and two half-hour Disney Sing-Along videos, for a grand total of 3 1/2 hours of TV. She was pretty much too sick to play or go outside, all day long, so we read every single book in the house (I even volunteered, out of parental sympathy and desperation to entertain her, to read all the ones that she loves and I hate) and filled up the rest of the time with what felt like a ridiculous amount of television.
So I was a little bit shocked, this morning, to Google and find that the average American child aged 2-17 watches an average of 3 1/2 hours of TV a day. I'm not anti-TV - Alex usually watches a half-hour to an hour a day, and I often watch an hour or two myself after she goes to bed. Most of the research I've seen that condemns TV as a medium is scientifically suspect. I don't want Alex watching commercials or age-inappropriate programming[2], but I don't lose sleep over an hour of vegging-out screen time in the middle of a day packed with developmentally rich activities. But 3 1/2 hours? More than a quarter of a preschooler's waking time? Every single day? Tests my resolution not to be judgmental about other people's parenting choices.
[2] My definition of age-inappropriate programming seems to be a lot broader than most people's. I don't want my two-year-old watching plots about romance/falling in love/getting married; children experiencing loss of, or prolonged separation from, their parents; people being evil and/or wanting to harm other people; or people or animals dying. None of those things are normal concerns of a two-year-old, with the exception of parental separation - a normal anxiety I don't want to feed by exposing her to examples of severe and prolonged separation. These objections pretty much rule out the entire Disney oeuvre, and yet the preschool years are supposed to be the height of love for Disney feature films.
no subject
At the very beginning, like when I was on my 3-month maternity leave, I watched anything at all in front of her. I think by the time she was Boo's age I had stopped watching stuff with a lot of violence, gore, or angry shouting, because I wasn't sure when it would start disturbing her. I still watched home improvement shows, cooking shows, baseball, and televised poker when she was awake and around. She mostly ignored them, and I tried to make sure that she was positioned so that the screen was behind her back.
We stopped watching our shows in front of her entirely when she was... I guess she was about one, or a little older. We stopped because she had started paying attention to the screen.
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If he went to bed earlier it would be easy, but his last bottle isn't until 10:30, and before then we get a couple of naps, but they can be as short as 20 minutes on some days. The kid doesn't sleep as much as he used to. I used to get two hour+ long naps in the evenings. (He sleeps a full 8 hours at night, and then has 3-3.5 hours of naps at daycare.)