And Then I Stepped in Gum . . .

A New Obsession

Ian (26 months) has become obsessed with our Baby Mozart and Baby Bach videos. When he first watched them, sometime around a year ago, he was so enchanted with the dragon puppet that he still says that dragons go "Bleah!" But it's been a while since we popped them into the VCR.

Now, suddenly, he's asking to see them all the time. He comes up to me and tells me he wants the "baba zhoh" (baby show) and rocks his head from shoulder to shoulder, using his made-up sign language for "music." Yesterday he saw the two shows a combined total of five times. Five times! This morning, it's only 10:25 and he's watched them three times. The Bach and Mozart concertos are actually competing in my brain with Hi-5 songs for earworm supremacy.

I'm torn about this. Sure, it's not good to plop the kid down in front of the TV for all that time. But it's true that during these shows he tends to watch less and play nearby more. And supposedly classical music is good for the brain, right? Plus, he gets a real kick out of identifying the objects in the videos, and is adding some words to his vocabulary -- "Bach" and "orange" among them.

I don't get this whole toddler obsession with repetition. I can't hardly ever want to see something more than once, though of course I probably did, since it's a normal phase of development. But things get old to me very quickly. When Katie was watching Sesame Street regularly, I used to celebrate with a joyful dance whenever the new season started, as by then we'd seen the same shows about five or six times. Come to think of it, I wonder how much I was able to indulge in my obsession for repetition when I was a small child. It was, of course, the age before VCRs and DVDs. I vividly remember that shortly after we got our first VCR, which my mom bought with money she saved through rebates and coupons (a big deal at the time), my little sister was hooked on Alice in Wonderland, and watched it over and over again. (In fact, we used to just start it near the end to fool her into thinking she'd watched the whole thing so that we could have the TV back -- oh, we were mean.) I guess I had a similar thing for my LP of Pete's Dragon -- so much so that I entertained my parents on hour-long drives with recitations of the movie to my little brother.

Anyway, I'm about done with the Bach and Mozart. It's driving me a little it batty. I guess I'm a Philistine, after all. Maybe I should track down a copy of Pete's Dragon . . .

posted by Jennifer Morgan, at 11:21 AM