screen time, acorn counting

There’s a big debate over how much (if any) screen time toddlers should be allowed. I’ve always thought it’s a bit silly. As long as a kid gets a good amount of interaction, physical play, and creative play, letting him watch TV while the parents make dinner or whatever is fine.

I still believe that. But I gotta admit, BB watching TV is weird. He’s so still. He just stares at the screen, zombie-like. At all other times, he’s a rambunctious chatterbox, constantly on the go; but if you put on a Miss Rachel video, it instantly sucks up all his attention. He becomes non-interactable. Like, even if you try and interact with him about the content on-screen. A bird appears on screen and I’m like “ooh, a bird!” and he’s just like o.o

(Side note: I hate Miss Rachel. Her voice is so treacly and exaggerated. It’s incredibly obnoxious. I realize I’m not her target audience and toddlers eat this stuff up. srsly though can we go back to Bluey, an actual good show where they talk like real people)

It’s fascinating to watch concepts take form in BB’s head. For instance, numbers. He’s been able to read the number 2 since 23 months, but he didn’t yet have any idea what it meant. It was just fun to point and say “two!!” His parents gave him a number puzzle, and he got to recognizing the rest of the numerals and reading some of them, and still didn’t have a clue. But now he’s got it. Friday night I drew a couple of sheep, and entirely unprompted he said: “two sheep.” Yeah!!

He absorbs concepts through the air. Slowly, but he does it. Just gotta give him nutrient-rich air. We woke up Monday morning to find only two acorns remaining in his acorn basket. “Hey! There were six acorns! Now there are only two! Where did the other four go?” He isn’t learning to subtract at two years old, but I figure he’s ready to grasp the idea that if there can be a certain number here, there can also be a certain number gone.