Posted on May 18, 2005 10:46 PM by chadley
I had an interesting experience tonight. Since a friend of mine is away for the week, we invited his wife and some other friends over for dinner. Some point after the invite, my sister asked if we could watch my niece the same night. It's the middle of the week so there's really no reason why we can't watch her and have dinner with our friends, so we agreed to baby-sit.I'm not going to detail the whole evening here, but the experience I mentioned in the beginning is the one of entertaining adult friends while you're trying to keep a 3 year-old entertained as well. In the beginning, there was no problem, but as the evening passed I realized that most television-based entertainment that is appropriate for a 3 year-old is most likely not very interesting to adults and a lot of things available and interesting to adults are not necessarily appropriate for a toddler. My first failure was an episode of Family Guy. Now, I've really not watched even one episode or even a large portion of a show, so I was a little surprised at the content. I think I turned it off right around the point where one of the characters was naked and offering to put on nipple clamps that were attached to a battery. Doh!
My next try was not quite so bad. I have the movie Shaun of The Dead. Now, I know that about 90% of this movie is inappropriate for a young kid, but I did fast forward to a funny part that I was explaining to my friends earlier that I thought was hilarious. The part where a couple of the main characters (I think) find an undead lady in their backyard but they don't realize that she's undead at first, they just think she's sauced. I did have to stop it at the point before I knew that it turned gruesome, but all was good. The really amusing part, I guess, is that during these different features, I expected my niece to be totally oblivious to what was on the TV screen and just go about her business with her Tigger book, but as I am sure any parent expects, she did exactly what I would have preferred she not do, which is to sit with her eyes glued to the TV.
I think I gave up on TV entertainment for the evening at that point. My friend Gene and I played an XBOX racing game, and my niece played too. I got a mini XBOX controller for the small children so they can hold onto it easier. That went okay, even though my niece is not yet at the point where she understands remote control. (What I do here affects something there.)
At the end of the evening, after all my friends had left, I realized, this is what it's going to be like to have kids. I remember a long time ago, going to my friend Scott's house to watch TV with him after work. I remember that while the TV show was on that we were supposed to be watching, he would spend like 80% of his time in the other room making sure his kid was staying out of trouble or something. I remember thinking, "How can you watch a TV show like that?" Simple answer is, "You can't." So you just have to record the show and watch it if you have time when you're not chasing your rugrat(s). Or in the end, you may find that it's just a show, and someday you'll look back on that time you played mini-soccer (in the house but it's okay, because we're not taking the ball off the floor, right?) but you're not going to remember or even care how that episode of Alias ended.
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