t.v.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends NO t.v. for children under the age of two.

What does this mean exactly? I'm pretty sure the AAP means that I should not plunk my child down in a chair and have him watch episodes of The Office or even the nightly news. Okay fine. But I'm pretty sure they are even more concerned about made-for-baby/toddler videos and other programming. Still fine here, I'm not really in to all that stuff either.

The issue is not me plunking Alexander down to watch t.v., it is the residual t.v. that he gets while I'M watching it or listening to it. It's a problem. He becomes entranced by the set and the flashy pictures. So I (we? not sure here) decided that the t.v. stays off as much as possible. For me, this means no t.v. during the day while Alexander is awake and in the room. If Jake is watching news in the evening, I try to have Alex at least not facing the direction of the set.

So far I'm about a week into this and it is going pretty well. I watched about two or three hours of t.v. total last week (The start of season three of HBO's True Blood, although I must say I wasn't that impressed). I was really ready for some t.v. watching by the Friday night/weekend but we managed to stay busy with friends and some projects that have been on the to do list since January. FINALLY on Sunday night after an hour and a half of getting Alexander to sleep all I wanted to do was watch t.v. SO I hunkered down and turned on the tele, went through all gazillion channels and everything on seemed boring, silly, or ridiculous. Is it possible that I have ruined t.v. for myself with just one week of not watching? So instead of finding out what Kate plus her 8 are now doing without Jon, I decided to pick up a book I had started last November.

BTW (by the way) I DO listen to jazz or some other type of music during much of the day. In fact, because we have a receiver, I can turn on our t.v. to the music stations and turn off the set and just hear the music :)

Enjoy this (hopefully last) picture of Alexander and the T.V.