Twenty two months and sixteen days

Alice is stringing more words together now, although her pronunciation is still idiosyncratic to say the least. Disturbingly, her longest sentence to date has been: 'Watch telly in a minute, mummy?' Disturbingly because I was quite convinced before she was born that we would remain a television-free household and thus avoid all such requests altogether. Ha! Ok, technically we are television-free in that we don't own a set. But then BBC iPlayer came along...

I'm not going to beat myself up about it though. When Alice still had a two-hour nap in the day, I used that time to do housework and maybe even have a nice cup of tea and a sit down. Now she only naps when she's out in the buggy, so a session with the electronic babysitter can feel like the only way to preserve a) a semblance of order and b) my sanity. And at least she doesn't see any adverts. [Cue sound of goalposts audibly shifting].

Speaking of TV, I sat down to watch Teletubbies with Alice the other day and thought to myself: wow, I can't believe it's ten years since I first watched Teletubbies and it's still on TV now! Then I realised that the REALLY unbelievable thing was that I'd watched it ten years ago. Willingly and with intent. Before I had a child. As did everybody I knew.

I know that at the time - the late 1990s - the country was still in the grip of Irony, and that infantilisation and nostalgia were all the rage. But looking back, I find that to be no excuse. After all, Teletubbies was a new programme at the time, not something from my childhood that I could legitimately get all gooey about. And as for it being somehow 'trippy', 'surreal' or 'psychedelic, man'... well, compared to lots of other children's programmes both before and since, it's pretty tame and orderly. I suppose it did speak to very studenty concerns though: toast, unpredictable cleaning appliances, and silly dancing. Oh and there was that one who was like, gay! Hilarious.