The Gentrification Of Sesame Street

Tags

children, children and media, children's programming, jim henson, old school sesame street, preschoolers, sesame street, toddlers, tv

Now that Owl is two we occasionally allow ourselves the luxury of putting Owl in front of the TV for some quality programming.

Over Christmas we had fun showing him The Grinch (which he loved) and Muppet Family Christmas (which he liked) and Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer (which he had no interest in).

Sometimes we let him watch some Sesame Street.

I really notice a difference between letting him watch Sesame Street on Netflix versus the Old School Sesame Street DVD that we picked up years and years ago.

Sesame Street has really changed over the years, and it’s more than just the loss of Jim Henson.

Farewell, Moby.

Tags

hoarding, life, tv

I have said that I am a bit of a hoarder.

Part of this is anxiety related. The mental answer to “should I throw out this piece of paper with an unidentified phone number scribbled in the corner” tends to be “but what if, at some point in the future, I remember whose number that is and decide that I DESPERATELY NEED IT?”

The other part is from my tendency to anthropomorphize things. The Ikea guy would totally yell at me. I just don’t like to get rid of my old things.

When I moved out here, though, we brought next to nothing with us. Only what we could fit in my Toyota Echo. I left most of my things behind. My papasan chair. My 70s retro mirror cube side tables. My cookware. My glass kitchen table.

It was very hard.

including one stuffed animal

On the other side, PH picked up a sofa and chair at value village, and we shelled out 100 bucks for the cheapest TV we could find.

Cable costs extra. We don't pay extra.

We didn’t even have a bed for the first year. As it is, our bed consists of a dented hand-me-down frame and a headboard which isn’t even attached to the bed, because of the aforementioned dent.

So when someone offered us her 32″ HDTV for $200 bucks, we jumped at the chance to own something that didn’t suck.

Slight problem:

It was enormous.

You see, this TV wasn’t LCD or even Plasma. It was still a tube television.

SCALED UP.

I can’t even tell you how difficult it was to get this thing into the car. It wouldn’t fit in the trunk OR the back seat. It would only go into the passenger seat, with the seat pushed and leaned back as far as it could possibly go, and that was with a LOT of squeezing.

The two of us together couldn’t even lift the damn thing more than a foot off of the ground, but somehow we had to get it up three flights of stairs.

Success smells sweet

We named him for the same reason you name a mountain – it’s so BIG that it demands a title.

By the time we hauled Moby’s heavy ass into our apartment, with new scratches on his casing because we had literally DRAGGED him up step by frigging step, he seemed like an extremely real entity.

(Since then we have lugged him through two moves, and I think our selection of places to live that were NOT up three flights of stairs was largely due to our desire to NEVER TAKE MOBY UP STAIRS EVER EVER AGAIN.)

He was totally worth it, though. The transition to a 32″ HDTV was amazing for us to behold.

THIS IS HIGH TECH, MAN

That was in 2007.

Four years later, we have begun to be aware that Moby is nearing the end of his natural life.

First one of his component video ports crapped out on us.

Then we began to notice a slight change in colour around his edges. Sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t, but it appeared more and more.

Also, as time has passed we have become less impressed by Moby’s size. Most of our friends have bigger tvs – or should I say, WIDER tvs that weighed a 75% less.

But while PH’s testosterone levels resulted in some minor drooling in stores when we passed those big, glittering screens, we never seriously entertained buying one. We had Moby. We would make do as long as he lasted, and when he died… we might have to live without a television for a while. Not the end of the world.

But then PH found a really good sale, and pointed out that by combining some Christmas cash with gift cards, we could get ourselves a big new TV without biting into our savings.

A lot of hemming and hawing ensued. I wanted the new TV as well, so I could try out my new Xbox Kinect (a gift from PH, who gets free stuff through his workplace points, of which he has many, because he keeps ranking first in the province for Best Something at Doing Whatever) on a proper screen.

But we’re not overflowing with money right now. Shouldn’t we use our remaining bonus cash on practical, boring things, and split my gift card into batteries or Colin Firth films, and wait for our 10 year old television to flicker and die?

After nearly an hour of waffling in the store, we decided to bite the bullet. We knew that Moby could crap out on us at any time, and right now we had the very rare wherewithall to actually pick up a new TV.

So we did.

It’s a difficult transition for me. I’m not a fan of spending money on things that aren’t food, diet pepsi, baby stuff, or books.

Plus I feel bad for Moby, looming in the corner until we can figure out how to get him out of the house.

But DAMN.

before

after

That’s an upgrade.

We’ve come a long way. 

Instead of scrounging for things, we’re trying to get rid of them.

I’m childishly excited by the new TV… BUT…

I still feel bad for poor Moby so I can’t help but question our decision. Besides, HOW DO WE GET RID OF HIM?

I hate change.

To Shut Up or Not To Shut Up: A Parent’s Question

Tags

attachment parenting, babies, dvds, friends, friendship, parenting, parenting styles, psychology, research, tv

When you have friends who are also parents, things can get awkward when parenting philosophies clash.

I have known since I was a teenager that I wouldn’t let my baby watch tv, and that I would use a diaper service, and that I would carry my child in a carrier instead of lugging around a car seat, and that I would breastfeed. They didn’t even feel like decisions. They were things I felt I knew about myself.

When I was getting my B.Sc in Psychology, I added things to my mental list of future parenthood.

I would practice attachment parenting, because I learned in Interpersonal Relations and Emotions classes how vital a secure attachment is to a person’s future happiness.

I would use babytalk (sorry, “parentese” :-p) with my baby, and sign language, because Psycholinguistics taught me that they actually speed up language development.

Watching a parent in a store, I would think about how I would deal with a discipline problem, using methods I had learned from Behaviour Modification.

Now I am a parent, and so are some of my friends.

And it can get awkward.

We see reflections of ourselves in the people around us

People feel very personal about their parenting decisions.

Everyone wants to be a good parent (I hope). No one wants to believe that they might be doing things wrong, and yet that fear lurks beneath the surface of every truly good parent. For that reason, people tend to get violently defensive of their own parenting techniques.

So I tread on eggshells.

I nod and smile when people suggest letting my baby cry it out, rather than lecture them about attachment styles. I downplay my use of the cloth diapers. Instead of talking to them about links to asthma, and low sperm counts, I tell them that “it’s laziness, really”, because the diaper service will deliver diapers to my house.

I don’t want to hurt my friends by suggesting that they did things wrong by letting their child cry it out, or by using disposable diapers. I don’t think they did do anything wrong. I just know I don’t want to do it.

Many of my friends are excellent parents whom I admire very much, and these little things are very minor in comparison to the many other things they do as parents that I wholeheartedly agree with. Some of them made those choices many years ago, when there was less information on the subject. So I don’t tell them why I make the choices that I make, in case they feel like I am lecturing them or implying that they did things wrong.

Doing this goes against my natural instincts, because I am a lecturer by nature. However, I was blessed with a friend of lesser intelligence when I was younger, and the hurt she invariably felt whenever I lost patience with her taught me the beginnings of self-censorship. I still don’t always know when to shut up, but I’m better than I used to be, and I know that parents don’t take lectures on parenting styles sitting down.

So I shut up, but sometimes it is really hard.

The other night, when a friend offered me her DVD for infants, which she referred to as “baby crack” I had to think fast to turn it down politely. I had an idea that a reflexive “Oh, HELL no, why don’t you just offer him some methamphetamines while you’re at it?” would not be a well-received response. This is a kind and intelligent person who doesn’t deserve that kind of rudeness.

I suppose I could have just accepted it from her and just never played it for Babby, but then she might have asked me how Babby liked it, and if I had been amused by it myself, and that could have started a whole web of lies. So I summoned every bit of tact I had and said,

“Thank you, but we have a DVD of original sesame street, and that’s enough for now.” I neglected to mention that there’s no way Babby is watching that before age two or three, either. I resisted adding that we don’t want Babby watching TV because pediatricians recommend absolutely no television before age two. I just said no thank you, and hinted that Babby was watching other things.

I feel bad, as if I had lied to my friend, because in a way I did lie. I misled her to think that I was not opposed to DVDs for infants, and that I had my own collection of such things. On the one hand, I spared her feelings and avoided insulting her own parenting choices. I feel that this was the right thing to do.

On the other hand, she babysits for us sometimes, and so I feel like I have delayed the inevitable… unless I want to take the risk that some day she will play “baby crack” for my own child… something I’m sure she wouldn’t do if she knew that it was against my rules. But if I tell her my rules, I’ll be risking making her angry and hurt.

What do you do, when someone suggests something for your child which violates your parenting beliefs? Conversely, what do you do if someone lectures you on your own?

I have some questionable parenting tactics myself