I Put Baby in the Corner

I had such lofty goals. My Netflix cue was paved with only the best intentions. But, alas, I fear time has run out.

When we brought the baby home from the hospital back in December, we set up a feeding station in the nursery. Our comfy glider/rocking chair fit perfectly in the corner between the crib and dresser drawers. We set up a small shelving unit and situated in it the hospital-grade breast pump we rented and a couple of baskets for various feeding accessories. Mostly, though, the baskets ended up storing our Kindles and iPods.

This is as good a place as any to mention that May wanted to nurse the baby and began pumping her breast milk as soon as she could after Xander was born. He nursed now and then as he learned to eat during the month he was in the hospital. (See here for the beginning of that story. The rest is still pending.) But when we took him home and were left to our own devices, we worried about his nutrition. He needed calories, and with breast feeding we couldn't tell how much he was actually processing. We decided that May would continue to pump--breast milk being the best milk--but that we would bottle feed him so that we could monitor his intake.

Still in the hospital.

At home. But the bottle is bigger than his head. Is that normal?

As we learned to feed the little tyke, it became a two-handed job. One hand had to hold him upright so that gravity could work the milk down to his stomach, while the other hand made certain he didn't get too much at once. Plus, it was a time-consuming task. He ate slowly and needed to be burped often. If we didn't hold him upright for at least a half hour after feeding, the milk would simply ooze back up this throat and leak out of his mouth. Sometimes violently. Talk about heartburn. Thus, for me, iPod listening and Kindle reading became an important part of the process.

Walking a fine line between teenage wit and adult situations.

May, however, couldn't read while pumping, even on a Kindle, because both of her hands were occupied. So she set a laptop on the top shelf next to the comfy chair, bought some elegant new computer speakers, and began watching TV online. Just a few months before May went into the hospital, we had discovered the joys of streaming television shows on Netflix. In the space of about two weeks last summer, I watched the entire series of Veronica Mars, down to the enticing and infuriating series-ender that ended nothing. Stupid cancellation. Murmur, murmur, grumble.

So once I was confident enough that Xander wasn't going to choke if I didn't witness every second of his ingestion, I, too, began to watch Netflix in the corner. And since last summer, the Netflix offerings have become just better and better.

Nothing to do with Ender's Game except the title.

I watched all of the Futurama episodes they had available. Then they put up the more recent Futurama movies and the most recent season aired on Comedy Central. It's not the Simpsons, but there's some pretty darn clever parody going on there. One episode has the entire cast of the original Star Trek trapped on a planet with an all-powerful, infantile non-corporeal entity, and only the Planet Express crew can save their heads and bring them back to earth. I watched this episode at like 2:30 in the morning and laughed so much I couldn't get back to sleep.

I started watching the seventies TV show Soap. This is supposedly one of the best television shows ever, but I was hardly aware of its existence when I was growing up. I'm sure my parents kept me far, far away.

(True story: They also didn't let my siblings and me watch Three's Company and The Jeffersons. I could understand, since I sneaked peaks of it as often as I could, why they didn't want their kids watching the sexed-up Three's Company, but I never really knew what was wrong with The Jeffersons. As I got older, I wondered if my parents might be a little bit racist and didn't want us to watch a black family moving it on up, but when I finally asked, I discovered that my parents just thought the show was stupid.)

Back to Soap, this show was a send up of soap operas, with all the crazy affairs and murders and misunderstandings common to a regular soap, but played for laughs. And it was funny, even if it was over-acted and starred Katherine Helmond. I can't stand Katherine Helmond. Even in the great movie Brazil, I can't stand her. The funniest bits of this show, peculiarly, are the jokes given to the ventriloquist Chuck who acts as though his puppet Bob were alive. They don't have much to do with any of the story lines on the show, but the one-liners are sharp and it all pays off when one of the other characters (all of whom think Chuck is insane) forgets for a moment and behaves as if Bob were alive, too. If you are a Soap novice, I dare you to watch this and not laugh.

Anyway, by the time I got the end of season two, there were demon-possessed babies and alien abductions, and that "outrageousness" turned me off so I moved on to Scrubs.

I watched Scrubs sporadically when it was on TV, but it always made me laugh. So whilst feeding the baby, I've gone through all nine seasons. Some episodes are extremely clever, like the one with all the Wizard of Oz references or the musical one (which was really just a Buffy knock-off, but still funny). The voice-overs and lessons learned every episode are a little too saccharine, but the zany characters and weird JD fantasies get me every time. And I liked the way music was incorporated into the shows. Sometimes Ted and his a capella group sings TV theme songs or his girlfriend, Gooch, makes up funny songs on her ukulele. And the entire, white-robe-clad Polyphonic Spree shows up. And Colin Hay is kind of a recurring troubadour, strumming his guitar, singing some Men at Work. He even appears in the series finale at the end of season 8.

Watching it from the beginning, I noticed that JD gets gayer every season (not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-that five!), and the last season is extraneous, but it's still enjoyable television.

Now Xander's grown to the point where sometimes he only needs ten minutes to chug down his bottle and he doesn't need to be burped anymore. So the television watching has really slowed down. I can't even watch a 40 minute episode of anything without him struggling to get out and away from the corner he's kept in. I really didn't mean for this to become a commercial for Netflix, but it makes me a little sad. The boy is growing up so fast I might never get to all those Stargates. Or finish the Rescue Me series. Or even Soap. Or rewatch all of Torchwood. Netflix now offers every episode of Cheers and The Cosby Show. I hardly even know what to do. I think my TV time is up.