Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Office Mom's New Guilty Little Secret

OK, deep breath. True confession time.

I've been letting the Working Baby watch DVDs at work when nobody else is in the office.

It gets worse: she does this in another room from where my desk is, because that's the only computer at our little nineteenth-century nonprofit that actually plays DVDs. So it's not even interactive television-watching, the kind that, I read somewhere once, actually gets a semi-free pass. Alas, I put the disk in, hit play, and flee.

I know, it's awful.

And I totally got busted, too; the kid's no dummy (yet--wait til she's brain-dead from watching tv), and now gravitates to that computer more than ever, pointing at it while she yells "Big Bird" and lolls her head back and forth in a dance move she apparently picked up from Stevie Wonder.

"No, no Big Bird," I told her yesterday, wandering out there to pick up papers from the printer.

"That's what that means," said Administrative Assistant (for whom, sadly, I won't come up with a nifty nickname before she leaves, having quit). "I knew that wasn't a game we play."

Nope. Because rotting brains out is a privilege reserved for mom.

I exaggerate, of course. I don't actually think it's the worst thing in the world for the Working Baby to watch a bit of the Jungle Book or Sesame Street in the early evening when the office is empty and I'm trying to finish up some work. I mean, we do (gasp) watch some television at home, and I'm sure if I were a stay-at-home mom we would watch even more than we do--and we don't even have cable. (Because there are, it turns out, a lot of hours in the day to fill. And television, unlike museums and most errands, is free.) But the pbs morning lineup includes Sesame Street, which is actually pretty fun for everyone to watch. And, as Dad, Esq., points out, we both watched television growing up, and we're doing reasonably ok in life. (By the way, we recently bought the "Old School" Sesame Street DVDs, and if we're ok having watched those--I swear, the first episode has a segment about prepositions that shows kids playing hide-and-seek in what appears to be a junkyard, not to mention the naked Ernie drying off from his bath with Bert's help and the creepy framing story in which Gordon invites a little girl up to his apartment for milk and cookies--well, then, kids today should be fine, if over-Elmo'd.)

Do I wish the Working Baby knew more names of real people, like the people she sees every day in the office, and fewer of Sesame Street characters? Well, yes, of course. But mostly, I guess, I'm just glad she's not into Barney or the Teletubbies.

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