I think my son's in Coldplay...

...He's kinda presumptuous, and he thinks everything is yellow.  (:ba-da-dum:)  Thank you, thank you.

But seriously folks, I'll explain.  The first is, my son is learning his colors.  The problem is, he thinks every color is pronounced "yeah-yo".  (We don't know if he really is having difficulty remembering the names, or if he just thinks it's fun to say because it sounds similar to how he pronounces "hello", i.e. "heh-yo".)  And on the other point, my kid has gotten pretty full of himself.  And I blame YouTube.

YouTube was great when he was younger.  If he got in a whiny or fussy mood, I'd just sit him in my lap and play cute videos, like of puppies playing or babies laughing.  (Babies and puppies playing TOGETHER is just gold.)  Laughter is highly contagious amongst babies (and others with suppressed immune systems), and soon enough, the cheesy, cutesy videos would have set him back in a good mood.  At which point Mommy could set him down to play and get back to whatever she was working on.

But one of the double-edged swords of him getting older is that his cognitive and communicational skills are improving by leaps and bounds.  And one of the realizations he has made is that Mommy's laptop is magic, and can produce images of clumsy kittens falling off tables to amuse him, at his will.

So now that he's big enough, no matter what I may be doing at the time, (like maintaining this blog, for example), what he gets a notion, he scrambles up in my lap and points to the computer screen.

"Kitty!" he may demand.  "Kitty meow!"

So, I head to YouTube, and search "talking cat".  And watch video upon video of chatty cats, with my son in my lap meowing back at the screen.  And since cute animal videos are a plague upon the bowels of YouTube, there is inevitably a video of a dog linked under the "Suggested Videos" column.  Which my son will see, and point to and yell "Doggy!"  So we start watching videos of doggies, which somehow seem to always lead to videos of dogs and babies.  And he will laugh at the antics of other babies almost endlessly.  (The only thing funnier to him are his own antics.)

Long story short, this is why I have to blog at 5:00 in the morning.  When he's awake, I have to be down on the floor playing with him until he gets bored or sleepy, and then wants to be cuddling in my lap, monopolizing my computer.

And as much as I enjoy the cuddle time, I simply cannot take any more YouTube.  If I wanted to deal with people who think their pets are remarkably smart and adorable, to the point of subjecting the world at large to footage of them, I would still work in a pet store.  And I don't need other parents' videos of their cute kids, either.  My kid is way more awesome, and even when he's not being endlessly entertaining, I have two nieces and a nephew to dote over as well.

Can anyone recommend any free online movies on Hulu or something that are animal or baby-centric?  I might as well watch two hours of schlock with a resemblance of a plot.  It's better that two hours of YouTube.