Owen is completely mobile now, which isn’t news.

I have an “entertainment center” in my office that is ripe with things that toddlers crave. It’s like a symphony of toys of the size he can swallow, flashing lights, buttons, keyboard, mouse, cables, and exposed power strips. It’s also a poster-worthy example of where a kid should not be.

Most days, if unattended, OVL will make a bee-line into my office and start pushing buttons, moving toys, changing all the settings on my audio receiver, hiding my mouse, and pulling books off the shelves. He turns power strips on and off at will, because he likes that when he presses the button, something happens. He also learned that mashing the big button in the center of the Xbox controller will make the Xbox itself light up.

Basically, this is his utopia.

The problem with all this is that when most evenings when he is asleep, after dinner and some “quality time” with the missus, I like to go upstairs into my study and play Xbox.

This is no longer a simple task. It used to be that I’d just sit in my chair, grab a controller, and start to play. Now, any of the following things must be added to the pre-Xbox task list:

• Finding the remote controls to turn on the TV.  I actually find myself doing this less and just using the physical buttons on the devices, unless:
• Restore color/audio/channel settings to the TV.  He likes to press buttons, as indicated, and every time you press a button on the remote control, it lights up.  This is feedback that he loves.  Once he gave me a custom picture setting where colors were more or less inverted.
• Locate the xbox controller(s).  They exist on a charging cradle that is now within his reach, and while usually they are “somewhere upstairs” relatively close to my study, there have been a few times when I’ve found the controller somewhere awesome like the (empty) bathtub.
• Turn power back on to the power strips.
• Figure out why nothing works.  This can be just because he’s changed the input on my receiver, but usually it’s because he’s pressed every single button reachable on all devices that sit on my shelves.
• I have a headset I wear for audio when playing Xbox.  It’s a wired 5.1 headset, with a wire that reaches across the floor from the Xbox to my chair.  It has buttons on it, and blue lights that flash when they are pressed.  Usually this is a matter of reattaching the cables, because he’s tripped on the cord.  Sometimes, I have to figure out what combinations of buttons he pushed to make it not work.
• Also on the headset is a little volume control where I can change the levels of each 5.1 channel.  This is done by using lit buttons that also do something when they are pushed.  I often sit down to play Xbox, pull on the headset, and then get hit by the equivalent of an aircraft taking off.  I spend the next half-hour deaf.

And all of it?  Still extremely entertaining.  I suppose at some point it’ll get frustrating, but then I can just close the doors, which will work until he learns how to open doors.