Educational TV for Preschoolers (Well, Sort of)

When my oldest child was three (she's eighteen now--she was seventeen when I wrote this on the other blog) she had a favorite movie: Crossing Delancey. Most people probably don’t remember that one.

I liked it too, so we watched the video a lot. It’s not a kid movie. It’s a romantic movie about a woman in New York City who has left behind her old-time Jewish upbringing for an intellectual job in a snobby bookstore, but still visits her grandma in the old neighborhood. Grandma hires a matchmaker to fix granddaughter up with an old-neighborhood pickle-store owner. Predictable plot follows, but we liked it. My daughter liked it because it had, she said, “no scary parts." (There was one part in a sauna that I used to fast-forward through because of the racy conversation.)

Now, we did watch kid movies too. About the same time, The Little Mermaid was out for the first time on video (I think). I had a three-year-old and an 18-month old and was chronically sleep-deprived (said oldest child did not sleep through the night until she was five). The three of us used to fall asleep in my bed, watching Little Mermaid, me with a child on each side, each of them with a thumb in the mouth and the other hand in my hair. They were both hair-twisters; it helped them fall asleep.

And we read books. I read to those two kids the most of any of them, because they were the first. I read to them all the time.

But occasionally, it was nice to take a break from Small Childhood and get to watch a movie that I myself liked. It was nice to watch Crossing Delancey with my three-year-old.

Current small children are three and four. The three-year-old is a Wild Thing and doesn’t sit still for videos.

The four-year-old reminds me of her older sister. Our favorite thing to watch is “Captain Show," which currently means the Star Trek Enterprise TV show. It can also mean Star Trek Voyager and even Quantum Leap (Scott Bakula is “captain" no matter what he’s in) but lately I’ve been working my way through the Enterprise seasons.

I rarely watch current TV. Much prefer waiting until a show goes off the air and then watching the whole thing in order on DVDs from the library--or now, through that wonderful invention, Netflix. No commercials, you can watch them whenever you want, and none of that ridiculous business of waiting a whole week to find out what happens next.

While I’ve yet to find time to watch a single episode of Next Generation or the original Star Trek, when my four-year-old was born, I started watching Deep Space Nine on videos. I needed something to do in the middle of the night when she wanted to be held and rocked and I could barely stay awake. Although I was capable of breast-feeding, reading a book, and eating a sandwich all at the same time, in the middle of the night it was easier to just watch something.

So, she was weaned on Star Trek. We worked our way through Voyager (with some odd gaps, since those came from the library and some were missing) and now with the help of Netflix, we’re on Enterprise. I’m up to the last few episodes (did the show get canceled because people got frustrated with all the two-parters?).

None of this has anything to do with anything, but hey, it’s my blog, right? I just think that one of my fondest memories of my baby girl will be snuggling together at night watching “Captain Show." We get three-year-old to sleep in the other room and then we curl up in my bed with the portable DVD player (another wonderful invention, that).

Today, my husband was watching one of the last episodes so I could send the DVD back and get the next one (dang two-parters!) It was about an alternate universe where all the regular characters were evil instead of nice. I didn’t show four-year-old that one because it was kind of depressing, but she saw Daddy watching it and asked, “Daddy, why do the captain and commander look funny like that?"

He put her off a couple of times. “They just do, honey." She kept asking.

Finally on one of my passes through the room with a pile of laundry, I told her, “It’s because they’re in an alternate universe."

“Oh, okay," and she ran off to play.

My husband stared after her. “Guess I should have just told her that."

Live long and prosper.