It's funny. Out of all those comments I got, only a handful of folks said, "That's too much TV!" OK, plus a bunch of people sent me private emails. But those are the ones that are sticking with me.
I do feel uncomfortable with it. I guess that's why I brought it up. So we're going to try to cut it down and see how she does. But I do have to say a handful of things in my defense. Ready?
1. Tori is not, at all, mesmerized by the television. When it's on, she looks it at now and then, but mostly she runs around the living room. She plays with her toys, she reads her books, and sometimes--if there is music on the television--she dances to it. If she plopped down on her butt in front of it and was hypnotized, we would have cut it out a while ago.
2. I don't allow her to watch anything that is too loud, to frantic, or too stupid. She watches few or no commercials if I can help it. We like to choose shows that feature music.
3. Sesame Street taught me to read.
Let's talk about that third one.
My television time was pretty restricted as a kid. I watched those early PBS shows, like Sesame Street (first generation!) and The Electric Company. There was also Zoom! My mom let me watch M*A*S*H sometimes, and I hovered around when she watched the news (I still remember footage from Vietnam). I wasn't allowed to watch cartoons (too violent) but I did sometimes turn the TV on with no sound before my mom woke up to watch them (sorry Mom) on Saturday mornings. Of course the TV died when I was five and my mom never replaced it, so after that my viewing was restricted to other people's houses (which really fucked me when I played TV tag at school).
The summer before I started first grade I went to stay with my paternal Grandmother for a few weeks. She had been an elementary school teacher, and to entertain me (or distract me) she gave me a bunch of early reading workbooks she still had lying around even though she'd retired. Thanks to the solid foundation I had in the alphabet from Sesame Street (and my mom, too, but Sesame Street made it visual), I taught myself to read.
By the time I got to first grade, I was able to easily read books (even chapter books).
Admittedly, this caused no end of trouble for me. When I returned the first grade reader to the teacher a day or two after she distributed it and asked her for the next one, she was completely flummoxed. She asked me to read some of it to her, which I did, then to read some other books to her, which I did. Finally she pulled a novel out of her purse and had me read that to her.
Eventually, she and my mother managed to argue my way into second grade, but I still read better than all my classmates. Today I still read voraciously (three books a week or so), and quickly (I read so fast that when Sarah and I were first roommates, she thought I was faking it).
So even though Sesame Street isn’t now what it once was (I have a DVD of the old show, though), it’s still pretty good. I’m going to let Tori still watch an episode while she eats breakfast.
But right now she’s sitting at my feet playing with pointy kitchen utensils* while we play classical music on the radio. That’s better, right?
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So here is something that is really fucking weird.
A few weeks ago I decided to join the 52 Weeks project on Flickr; so every week for the next year I'm going to take a self-portrait and post it to the group. Sound familiar? It is--I'm totally imitating Sarah and her 365 project (now in year two!). But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, no?
So my first shot was nice and tame, my second one was funny, and I decided to really go for it with the third one. Don't click on it at work--might not be work appropriate. After all, with Sarah as my mentor, it means there has to be nudity. I thought that it would be really wild to take close up shots of my nipples with milk coming out of them.
So I did, and they came out cool. But in the process I got milk everywhere, and I ended up tasting some from both nipples (what? you don't lick it off when it gets on your hands?). And here's what's fucked up and weird: the milk? from my left nipple? IT TASTES BITTER AND SALTY. But the milk from the right boob? Just as sweet as ever.
Tori hasn't been nursing on the left side for a while, and no fucking wonder! Has this happened to anyone else? For some reason I'm completely freaked out by this.
*Tori's playing with a whisk and a bowl. Obviously I was kidding.
