Oh What Lungs Hath She!

Earilier this week Bridget and I made the decision to turn off the television for one whole entire day in an effort to break the t.v. addiction in our 2-year-0ld. It seems insane that a 2-year-old can be addicted to anything, but she really is. Only I had no idea how badly things had gotten out of control with her.

In the one day detox, Meric learned to play! The child literally had not been playing and I had no idea!!! She likes to put figurines in vehicles and make the "go". She LOVES Potato Heads and she even pretended to care about a baby doll. These are all activities that I have not seen her do with any kind of interest or for any recognizable length of time. I'm really pleased with our decision to cut the screen time. Now we're letting the kids watch two shows a day. Typically this means they each get to pick one. I've set the limit to one in the morning and one after nap time. The best part is that they haven't asked to see as much t.v. and they're really only getting in one video a day. This is a huge improvement. But, back to what I eluded to earlier, we had no idea how bad things were with Meric and her addiciton.

In addition to television, Meric also LOVES to go to bed with her brother's Leapster handheld game. I've not thought much about it until last night when she crawled in bed with us in the middle of the night and brought the game with her. I woke up to her playing the frickin game!!! I think she played the game all night. Has she been doing this for weeks?! Is that why she's so off schedule and tired!? What kind of mothers are we!? So we decided to get the Leapster out of Meric's site so that it didn't become an issue at night. Who wants a head-on opposition struggle at bed time, right? Well, Breck was playing the game and Meric wanted a turn (all right before bed time). They each have a turn but Meric refuses to cough up the machine when it's time to go upstairs to bed. When I took the game from her and hid it, she threw a massive tantrum which we both expected. Meric has a screem that could be bottled and sold for the movies. When she let out her usual blood curling scream of frustration, she actually set off the glass break detectors on our alarm system and had it blaring across the neighborhood. That's 0ur girl! Oh what lungs she has!