Ninety Wasted Minutes

Bedtime at our house has been a big fat pain lately. It wasn't DST that did us in; the first week after we sprung ahead Nathan still went to bed like a champ shortly after 7:00. Somehow, though, in the course of getting dragged along to late-night rehearsals and having a babysitter, Nathan started having trouble falling asleep again.

Well, okay, "trouble falling asleep" sounds like something in a sleeping pill commercial. Nathan's "trouble" falling asleep stems from the fact that he actively tries to stall in every possible way he can to avoid going to sleep. And even after he's tried the legitimate stalling techniques -- your asking for a drink, your I need to say goodbye to Dad -- he just does everything humanly possible to prevent his body from entering a sleeping state. He sits up. He kicks his legs. He mindlessly grabs at blankets.

You might recall that out of laziness, I have become that mom who lies down with her kid to get him to go to sleep. But after over an hour of lying there getting mad, I told Nathan to just go to bed on his own last night. He must have been tired, because he actually complied.

So, after a long day of shenanigans with my four-year-old, followed by an hour and a half of bedtime shenanigans with that four-year-old, I went downstairs to decompress by watching a TV show about ... a group of four-year-olds. The show, on Lifetime ("Television for Women"), was called Playdates. (And how many times have I told you guys that I hate the term playdate anyway? Answer: At least two.)

The deal on Playdates is that they follow around a group of four-year-olds at a Manhattan preschool. But the part that's annoying is, there's an adult narrator who is supposed to be speaking the thoughts of one of the kids. And she says stupid stuff like, "I finally felt like I had broken into the preschool social scene," or, "I realized then that James would be the first of many men who would let me down." Also the adults behind the show seemed to set up elaborate playdates so they could film the kids in outside-of-school activities, because an entire class of preschoolers always sets up a impromptu weekend lemonade stand in the park.

This show made me so angry. So I watched the entire half-hour program.

Following Playdates was another train-wreck-that-you-can't-look-away-from, a show about little kid cheerleaders. The thing about cheerleading is, I kind of have a love/hate relationship with it. I hate to admit it, but I kind of wish I had been a cheerleader in high school. Cheerleaders are so cute and popular. But on the other hand, cheerleading is not respected as a sport (by me or anybody else), and pushy parents of little kid cheerleaders are especially problematic.

Although, like the beauty pageant moms, cheerleader moms are great for sound bytes that make us all feel way better about our own parenting. A few I heard last night:

• "McKenzie has six-pack abs. She doesn't have an ounce of fat on her." (McKenzie was 8 years old.)
• "We teach the kids that winning is everything."
  
• "My priorities go cheerleading up here [holds hand way up by head] and everything else down here [holds hand down by waist]."
  

Plus, I don't want to sound like an old prude or anything, but do six-year-olds need to wear bare-midriff crop tops? They don't have any boobs! Would your team just automatically lose any cheerleading competition if you wore full-length shirts?

And the makeup on these girls! And that weird fake-hair sticking-up ponytail attachment!

But I watched the entire hour-long show, because I had to find out whether Midwest Magic or Step 1 Minis won the competition! (Spoiler alert: Neither. The producers of this show couldn't follow around a team that actually won?)

So, Playdates + cheerleaders = 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back.