Why do children love remote controls? Is it the buttons? Is it the lights? Is it the chance to make your parents insane with frustration? Yes, it is. The third one. They want to make me crazy. There is nothing babies like better than to grab the remote control, push as many buttons as possible, and somehow irrevocably change all of your settings. This also applies to computers as well.
We finally got TV and internet back yesterday, which means we now have a new remote control for Edward to hide/mash. He is very excited about it. I am nervous. Last fall he got his hands on our remote and somehow managed to change the picture size on the TV so that you couldn’t see the edges of the screen. It was zoomed in or something. It was like that for almost two months, because I couldn’t figure out what button on the TV remote he had pushed to do it. As it turns out, thanks to a lot (a lot) of internet searching, I discovered it was actually a setting on our cable box that he had changed, and we managed to switch it back so that we could once again see the subtitles, dates, times, and locations that are often printed on the bottom of the screen during shows.
The worst thing that ever happened due to random button pushing, was when Ruby was about 2. I had our pictures up on the computer because I was looking at them, or printing them, or something, and Ruby came over and started mashing buttons and permanently deleted all of her baby pictures. In fact, the whole year of 2007 was gone from the external hard drive where I had been keeping them. I got some back from having posted them on facebook, and a file recovery program got some of them back, but we still lost about half of our pictures from the year 2007.
I try to keep remotes and computers away from the children, but I can’t ever find the stupid remotes in the first place. This is because the children like to hide them. If, for some reason, the button pushing does not cause enough havoc, they decided to just remove the remotes from the equation entirely. This also makes Daddy very crazy. And the crazier Daddy gets, the more the children giggle and think that what they have done is the most funniest fun that they have ever participated in.
So to all my friends currently having babies, hide your remote controls. I know it sounds silly, but believe me, there is nothing more frustrating than spending hours hitting every possible button on your remote, in the vain hope that you can get rid of the French subtitles.