Every once in a while in my adventures as a new parent, something happens that makes me think "Is it possible that the baby is smarter than me?" This is the story of one of those moments.

Back before Kate was born, I read about a study some group did on the effect of television on the development of a child's brain. The overall conclusion was that television viewing should really be kept to a minimum (none at all before two years old, if you want to know what they actually said) and that typical television programming, with commercials and rapidly-changing images and sounds is too much in any case, so age-appropriate programs should be chosen.

This made sense to me, and so Dan and I have never really watched television around Kate. This means we watch a lot less T.V. than we did before she was born, which is also not a bad thing. She does, however, see us turn the television on and off when we put on her Baby Signing Time DVD that I've written about before. She likes the television remotes because they have buttons, but she hasn't seen them in action much.

This is why we were really shocked when, about a week ago, after she had succeeded in pulling one of the remotes off the end table by our couch, she promptly turned around and pointed it at the television. And every time after that, when she managed to snare a remote of any sort, she would wave it around at the T.V. Of course, nothing happened, but it was obvious that she understood that something might happen if she just kept at it long enough.

Then a couple of days ago, I was in the kitchen washing dishes, and Kate was tooling around in the living room in her walker. I heard her drag one of the remotes off the table, and didn't think anything of it until a few minutes later, over the sound of the running water in the sink, I heard this male voice in the living room. I came around the corner to see this:

Kate had turned the television on and was enjoying a program called "Take-Home Chef," which, as I learned, involves a beefy blonde male Australian chef going up to random people in the grocery store and offering to go home with them and cook dinner. And yes, I let her watch it for a few minutes, just because she was so proud of herself for finally making the television turn on. She clapped, and laughed and bounced up and down in glee. So I let her have her little victory.

But now the remotes live in a drawer in the coffee table instead of out in the open. I figure that will at least keep her from ordering pay-per-view movies for a few more days. Instead I think I will encourage her other recent hobby of stealing my cookbooks off the shelf in the kitchen. Who knows? Maybe she'll cook us dinner.