Tv, mommy and me

I'll never forget the distinct guilt that beset me after my first tv session with Josh. I had discovered the soothing, near-hypnotizing power it had over him when he was a couple months old. By then I had seen on multiple blogs and heard from multiple attachment-style mommies' mouths that tv could damage my baby's brain, eyes, ears and future intellect-- or what would be left of it.

I got up the nerve to live on the protective mama edge and watch a couple hours of Sprout with him on a day I was so sick and fevered that I can't even call it a conscious decision, but rather a survival strategy.

For those of you who abstain from baby-aimed tv, you are missing a world quite psychedelic actually. Sprout, along with its cousin, Nick Junior, along with several permutations and relatives that inhabit a twelve-channel continuous span on my Fios remoteprovide deliciously tempting twenty-four hour a day mommy breaks.

Sprout alone though, has the built in mama-guilt reliever of being associated with PBS somehow,despite its strange and disturbing commercials for debt-relief companies starring the likes of daytime tv has-been Montel Williams, who coincidentally hosted the only tv show I've ever been on as an audience member or as anything for that matter. While that does make his get-out-of-debt-to-them-and-into-debt-with-us scheme slightly less sinister, it does little to keep me or my son from indulging in our now-nightly habit of watching the seemingly interminable "Good Night Show" with "our friends, Nina and Star." Nina is a pajama-clad thirty-something who smiles without moving her eyebrows or revealing any other sign of genuine happiness and Star is a stuffed five-prong infantile entity, with whom she engages with in a passive-aggressive bedtime battle each night. She provides him and the babies at home with convenient delay tactics, such as matching games, arts and crafts and toothbrushing-instruction, complete with a dancing toothpaste-glob family.