Crack for babies?

And this week in Diaperland …

1. Chris got his grove back (and then some).
2. Sophia got hooked on Baby Einstein.
3. Gus continued to show off his dimples and mastered sleeping through the night.

OK, I know most of you would like to be spared the details of 1, so I’ll skip right on to 2.

My beloved firstborn is already an addict at age 17 months. It started out innocently enough. We were getting rather bored with our toys, games and books. We were cranky from staying inside all day. We needed some new entertainment … oops, I mean, enrichment.

Oh, OK. Mommy needed to load the dishwasher for once without worrying about us grabbing a meat cleaver from the silverware rack and hacking our little finger off while Mommy’s back was turned for a split second. Mommy figured one little DVD couldn’t hurt. Mommy was horribly wrong.

If you’re reading this and you’re a parent whose kid is also hooked on Baby Einstein, you’re probably smiling knowingly by now. If you’re a parent who’s heard me denounce TV and then smugly tell you about Sophia’s love for reading, you’re probably eating this shit up with a gigantic spoon. If you’re a parent-to-be, take heed!

As Sophia completed her 100th lap around the living room carpet one day last week, I casually slipped Baby Newton into the DVD player (Baby Newton, if it isn’t obvious, is about geometrical shapes.) When the music cued up, she stopped in mid-step, transfixed. A multicolored caterpillar inched its way across the screen. “Bee!” Sophia called out proudly. Technically, it wasn't a bee. But it resembled one. Baby was interacting with the thing, dammit. I headed off to the kitchen to rinse dishes.

Hearing a catchy tune about shapes a few minutes later, I went into the living room to check out the action. Sophia was leaning on a chair, sucking her thumb, utterly frozen in space and time. When she saw me, she took her thumb out to blurt, “Wassat?” and pointed to a 3-D clown dancing jerkily with a 2-D triangle on screen. “It’s a clown!” I sang enthusiastically. “A clown!” she repeated happily, and promptly returned her thumb to its former position. I returned to my dishes.

Well, the video ended just as I was ready to tackle the rest of the kitchen. "So that’s what the'repeat play' option is for," I thought. I looked around my filthy kitchen, then marched back into the living room. “Shapes are ed-u-ca-tion-al!” I sang in my head as I grabbed the remote and hit repeat play.

An hour later the kitchen was spotless, Sophia still had all ten of her tiny fingers and we were back in the living room doing our thing. We read a couple books. Played ring around the rosie. All of the sudden, my Baby Einstein was pointing at the TV. “Shapes, shapes!” she cried.

“Ooooh-kaaay!” I replied. “Let’s play with these shapes.” I grabbed the new building blocks with shape cut-outs Santa brought us for Christmas. Sophia looked at me as if I’d given her a pile of razor blades and shoved the blocks away from her with disgust. “Tee-fee, tee-fee!” she wailed.

She's continued to wail and beg for tee-fee and shapes every hour on the hour since.

Before I'd ever seen it, I was against Baby Einstein. For one thing, they’re owned by Disney. Disney wasn’t satisfied with buying and bastardizing the good names of Dr. Suess and A.A. Milne, among others. No. They had to go way back to before there were copyright laws and pilfer Einstein, Newton, Shakespeare and Bach. (Not that we’re talking apples to apples here, but I don’t see a Baby Elvis, a Baby Gates or a Baby Spielberg coming to your tee-fee screen anytime soon.)

The first time I saw one of the Baby Einstein videos I was pissed. Pissed I hadn't come up with the idea myself. Any monkey with a camera could make these freaking videos! Most of them are just close-up shots of different toys spinning around. If you read the credits, you realize that some hacks with a mini DV camera probably did make them up on a rainy day – almost the entire cast and crew have the same last name!

Yeah, I knew Baby Einstein was a sham, a sappy, stupid video code-named Einstein so poor Mommy doesn't feel so guilty about plopping baby in front of it for hours on end. But I swear – I didn’t know it was crack!

Actually, Baby Einstein is more like heroin than crack. Slowly, the bright colors fade onto the screen, accompanied by the soft tinkle of the xylophone. The lights and colors spin faster and the music gets louder, simultaneously luring and lulling baby until she’s in a multimedia coma, oblivious to the real world. Then Mommy finishes her housework or bills or baby blog. The screen suddenly goes black. Baby comes crashing down. Hard.

Mommy crashes, too. As she tries to convince her screaming child that she can go for a few more hours without staring at toys on a tee-fee screen and actually play with the real things, Mommy realizes she’s become one of them – one of those lazy, disorganized, uninspired mothers who hires Disney or Nickelodeon or Baby Freakin’ Einstein to watch her kid. She’s sold out – and all for one lousy load of clean dishes.

Like the heroin addict, once she’s come down from her clean-dish high, Mommy vows never, ever to resort to Baby Einstein again. And the Baby Einstein DVD mysteriously disappears. "It's lost," Mommy says, shaking her head as baby pleads for it for the umpteenth time.

But then, days later, the laundry begins to pile up. Baby has worn the same pair of socks for two days straight. Daddy trips over the dirty diapers littering the floor next to the overstuffed Diaper Genie.

Just one more time, Mommy thinks. Just enough to get me through one load, maybe two.