Alder's Tone

We have never made a real effort to restrict his TV time, but it sort of panned out like this: While MOTS was on maternity leave he got no telly time as they were always doing something. It was very rare he saw the box until she went back to work, and then it was mainly Hollyoaks over dinner.

Then I discovered miniminiminiminimoremilkshake on Channel 5 on a morning. 06:25, Thomas & Friends. Fantastic. At first it was more for me than the little fella, but starting 5 minutes before getting up posed a problem. That's why I start recording it, get the lad up, then get back in bed to start watching it just a few minutes later. He'll go between watching the full thing and not really entertaining it. Either way, he'll stop what he's doing and start dancing to "They're two, they're four, they're six, they're eight, Shunting trucks and hauling freight...".

At the other end of the day is Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Put another way, you have to have taken a serious quantity of hallucinogenic drugs to understand "In the Night Garden...", apparently by the same folk who did Teletubbies.

I had lunch with Mr Gent on Friday, and over a pie and pint we discussed the general merits of the show, and how he'd noticed that when Igglepiggle's blanket was missing "yeah, Makka Pakka's got it..." (well, proven last night, the Pontipines had it). Sad, two grown men discussing Ninky Nonks and it not being some sort of euphemism, nudge nudge, snigger snigger.

Bedtime, tombliboosWhere was this going...? Oh, yes, In The Night Garden... is part of cbeebies' Bedtime Hour, to get them to slow down and relax ready for bed. And it seems to work. Don't ask me how, it just does. And I must admit I'm liking the structure of the show, if not the changing sizes of characters, and I have no idea how the Pinky Ponk gets off the ground. So what happens after it's finished? We go to bed. And he's been quite OK about going upstairs, even heading in that general direction himself.

Tonight took it a bit further. We had a visitor so bedtime was slightly delayed. Only very slightly, but at the end of In the Night Garden... he wandered over to the lounge door, reaching up to the handle and shouting for it to be opened. Then went straight for the stairs, up two, looked round, nobody following, came back to ask to be followed. Why? Because it's bedtime and we weren't taking him.

So not only does he know when bedtime is, he reminds us when we're not ready.