FEBRUARY 20, 2026 – Our son Byron and daughter-in-law Mylène have laid down some immutable rules in their household. One is that their kids—a toddler and a newborn—will have no unsupervised “screen time.” I think this is probably a good rule. Both kids have a hint of pink-eye and must have eyedrops administered twice daily. The infant has no idea that this isn’t in the same category as all other activities at her current stage of life. The toddler, on the other hand, protested so vehemently that both parents and grandparents were at a loss. The scalawag is only quasi-bribable, and chocolate, his usual quasi-bribe currency, was not about to do the trick. So . . . his dad said he could . . . watch TV (!) if he first accepted the eye-drops. Given the extraordinary deal he was being offered, Dio finally settled down. His choices were one episode of Thomas the Tank Engine or one of a French language cartoon featuring anthropomorphic pigs. He chose the pigs.
I watched our grandson watch the cartoon pigs and realized the wisdom of the no-unsupervised-screentime rule. The little guy was mesmerized by the TV. Nothing could divert his attention except when the show ended and the TV was turned off. Byron later remarked about his belief that his son’s keen interest in books and being read to is a direct benefit of the no-unsupervised-screentime rule.
The house is a veritable mega-library of kid books, and we’re all quick to satisfy a reading request. Well, in most cases. Three days ago, I was presented with Sherm the Germ. Our grandchildren were already sporting runny noses, and the last thing I wanted, was to contract a cold—as I have on every trip to Connecticut except our annual June trips. I suppose catching a cold (my fingers are still crossed against the pink-eye) is to be expected when in the extended company of a toddler who attends Montessori school five days a week. Why, then, temp fate even further by reading Sherm the Germ?
Call me superstitious, but I eschewed Sherm the Germ and buried it under a stack of books in a remote corner of the living room. Yet, Thursday I woke up with cold symptoms, which increased throughout the day until by bedtime, I was feeling quite ill and cranky. Somehow, Sherm the Germ had found his way into my system to cause me grief. So much for tip-toeing around my superstition.
In defiance, earlier yesterday I’d nevertheless assembled the “big boy bed” that we’d purchased Monday from Ikea in New Haven. The most difficult aspect of the project was removing the parts from the cardboard box that had been shipped with bed components all the way from China. I was grateful to have on hand from Dio’s impressive toy inventory, the perfect sized “Caterpillar” dump truck—not for the main members of the bed, per se, but for “hauling” all the fasteners required to hold the bed together.
As the evening progressed, I ran out of steam and was forced to interrupt a very long sequence of daily posts. I very much feared that by skipping a day, I’d wind up sliding down a very slippery slope: miss one day, and it’s all too easy to make it two, three and so on until it’s a week, then a month, and . . . there goes the blog!
So here I am at the keyboard, sitting alone downstairs after everyone else has gone to sleep and “when all through the house/Not a creature [is] stirring, not even a mouse[-turd] . . .” (as our grandpa Nilsson used to say to get a laugh out of us). When I woke up this morning, I discovered that I’d completely lost my voice to laryngitis. Despite lots of hot tea, I developed nothing more than a strained whisper. I had no choice . . . but to write, and I were to write, I figured, I should attend first to this blog and avoid the slippery slope.
Otherwise, I remain optimistic. Time to show Sherm that he doesn’t have the upper hand. Nor does a dark and dreary winter. With the continuous tilt of the earth toward the sun, the days are getting longer—then warmer, and both Sherm and winter can go into hiding, at least for a good long while.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
