Videos and mom guilt

My girl's noses are gushing like old faithful, just the other direction, meaning fairly bad sleep and equally bad moods for all parties.

A partially bald baby Naomi watching White Christmas- starting her early

I decided earlier this week to try to cut back or even cut out videos, very idealistic. Immediately they got these colds AND our old-school cassette tape player died. Why would that matter you ask? Because one of my most frequently used alternatives to "screen time" are very old books-on-tape given to us by my mom and mother-in-law. Most of them are falling apart and in general they only keep the 2 year-old happy for about 5 minute increments, but those are 5 minutes of gold that I NEED, seriously. The best part  about them is I don't feel the crushing amounts of guilt for frying her brain like I do with videos. In fact she has memorized most of her tapes and recites them without the books which has to be good right? Or maybe it's just as bad, who knows. All I know is that for some reason putting videos on for her makes me feel like a straight up TERRIBLE mom. I am sure I am being overly anxious, as I usually am, and I am sure that by the time we're on kid #4 or something I will just have the TV playing all day. And for now I have thrown my new-found no video resolution out the window and am currently playing the new Winnie The Pooh movie, pretty cute actually.


On another note, here are some Naomi-isms that are consistently making me laugh and may make you do a half smile or something:

1) Naomi keeps on calling Bernadette "My child" or "My little dear", both of which I think she got from a video or book-on-tape

2)Naomi keeps on saying that the post to her bunk beds is her prince and she hugs it and says she is getting married and moving far away from us and that she will not see us for a long time- hilarious and terribly sad for me at the same time

3) She is not peeing all over everything anymore which is great, and she will occasionally go to use the potty but then will refuse to go in because "the huntsman is still using the potty"(The "huntsman" who tries to kill snow white in Snow White, great.) so we wait until he is done and then we go in.

Can't think of anymore currently, I am sure more will come up.

LASTLY but not LEASTLY:
A SMALL IMPROVEMENT ON THE SUPER SKINNY MOCHA:

Add some peppermint extract to make a Super Skinny Peppermint Mocha- you only need to add a small dash. I remembered that I used to do this while I was on weight watchers before our wedding and when I passed up a delicious tin of peppermint hot chocolate at the store yesterday it came to me. a welcome memory.