Couch potato in the making

I need to look back in my files and see if it was ever this bad with Liam. I remember him going through a period where he enjoyed watching TV, though it seemed short-lived and much less all-consuming than Mallory's obsession. She does not care about the TV as much as she cares about her DVDs... she wants one in first thing in the morning, and will sit right here in this little leopard chair watching the screen until night if we let her.

Maybe the issue is that we didn't have this many DVDs (about 10) when Liam was this age. Hmmm.

It's quite hilarious, though - she has an impressive vocabulary, and much of it comes from her DVD hobby. When a DVD gets stuck she comes running out of the playroom yelling "Fix! Fix!" She also knows words such as "Fox" (translation: I want to watch The Fox and the Hound), and when she says "Book" it doesn't usually mean let's read a book; it usually means: I want to watch Jungle Book). (Thankfully, she does enjoy reading too. "Night Night [long pause] Moon" is her favourite.)

We recently replaced our DVD player, as she was a little too rough on it, and thank goodness the new one was only $30 because she is none too gentle with it, either. (We are trying to teach her to be gentle, with mixed results, and there is just no getting her to stop using it now that she knows how it works.) We also have one DVD that skips no matter how many times we try to buff the scratches out. It only recently occurred to us that we could maybe burn copies of the DVDs and keep the originals for safekeeping, so we'd still have a useable version when the inevitable happens. Last night I dropped $30 on a spindle of dual-layer blank DVDs to do just that, only to discover that I need some sort of special software to do it... argh... maybe we will just suck it up and replace them one by one as they are ruined after all!