Saturday, January 7, 2005
Mooie Star

Ruby is a star, no doubt about it.
 

I truly love movies and video games, but I swore I’d never sit my kid in front of a TV in a tactical electronic babysitting manner.  Once, while Ani was pregnant, I even high-horsed a coworker who told me she used to think the same thing, until she had a screaming kid who wouldn’t let her complete the day’s necessary tasks. “I think I’ll be able to organize my time better than that,” I told her with a bit of a sneer.  Sadly, I don’t know where she works now, or I’d apologize. 

Work, school, and Ruby leave very little time for everyday things like making dinner or adjusting a bike derailleur.  I used to believe that complaints about how hard it is to organize a home and raise a family were just plot devices for crappy prime-time sitcoms or dish soap advertisements.  Housewifey, protestant, soccer mom, minivan driving, Middle Americans may battle with the mundane, but I am a modern ex-hipster who is computer savvy and counter-cultural, and I create my own reality.  I am not subject to the laws of banality! Right?  Sadly, no.  No matter what indie pop music I play in the background, no matter how laid back and cool I try to be: laundry needs washing; Ruby needs changing, etc. 

We read to Ruby a lot.  We play blocks and go to the park as often as possible.  She has a sauté pan and some fake vegetables for cooking.  She has a bike, several puzzles, likes to help us work in the yard, and enjoys her christmas rocking horse. 

There is much more to her waking life than watching the tube.  But the fact of the matter is, for fifteen or twenty minutes in the morning, Ruby watches a DVD about the alphabet or counting so that Ani can take a shower and get ready to go to work.  If she stays home with me, we play most of the day without the television.  At about five or five-thirty however, in goes Nemo or the Muppet Movie for about a half an hour so I can get dinner ready.  The upside is that Ruby can count to fifteen, and she sings her alphabet.  The downside is her slack jaw and her glazed eyes as she sits in her chair watching the TV. 

We have a Nintendo Game Cube.  Nintendo, unlike Xbox or Playstation, has lots of really good and deep yet cute games that Ruby likes to watch (she hasn’t quite figured out how to play yet.)  She sits between Ani and I as we race Mario Karts and she yells “GOOD JOB MOMMA!”  “YAY DADDY!”  She gives wonderfully distracting congratulatory kisses to each of us and screeches giddily at the cute characters on the screen.  I know many people would disagree with me, but playing video games is so much better than her sitting alone in a chair and watching Disney.  Time spent together with a video game is a productive and good experience; if it is not just a single player experience, if the game is right and reasonable limits are set.  But it’s still not reading or building or drawing or exercising. 

I tell myself she’s doing better than a lot of kids: we don’t have any broadcast television in the house except for the occasional fuzzy rabbit ear antenna reception football game, so she is only watching programs that Ani and I approve of and enjoy.  In the end, I know these are bullshit justifications, and I get sad when she runs into the house and points at the cabinet where the movies are kept and repeats in an escalating chant, “Mooie, Mooie, MOOIE, MOOIE…”  “Ok, Ruby, you can watch your movie, but just for a little while.”