–They love Mary Poppins. LOVE. IT. They are crazy about “Poppy”. I swear we watch it at least once a week. They imitate the characters, they sing the songs, they dance around, even when we aren’t watching the movie.

–They also like Ratatouille, and I would consider that to be a fairly subdued movie– not too many emotionally stressful situations. The plot is a little sophisticated for the toddler set, and there is some brief gun shooting at the beginning (the woman discovers a rat in her house and begins firing at it– we talk about being kind to animals and “shoo”ing instead of trying to hurt them– we usually just skip that first part anyway).

–I don’t know that it would suit for a family movie night, but Scholastic puts out these lightly-animated (using the book’s illustrations) versions of favorite children’s books, and there’s a DVD that has some Maurice Sendak favorites, including Where The Wild Things Are, In The Night Kitchen, and the Nutshell Library, set to music and sung by Carole King. My boys LOVE it, and they ask for Max and Mickey all the time. It’s relatively short, too.

–The Muppet Movie is another that my boys love. They sing songs from it all the time. It was one of my favorites as a child, but I do recall that the scene where the doctor tries to “fry” Kermit was very scary to me. My boys don’t seem to be phased by it, but it’s probably because they don’t understand it yet. There are some guns, and there are some punching/kicking parts (defensively, but still). On the whole, I don’t think they understand much of the plot, but they LOVE the Muppets, and they love the music, so it gets played a lot. It probably helps that it’s one that I don’t mind watching a lot, too, since it’s one of my personal favorites.

–Fantasia 2000 is another good one. There’s a few sensitivity-provoking scenes, but they are very brief.

–They also enjoy Pixar movies, and for the most part, I’m pretty okay with most of the “violence”/”thematic” elements in these movies. They like Monsters Inc., though there’s a scene in the middle that I skip where the monster scares the little girl on accident. They love Toy Story (1, 2 and 3), and Cars. And they also have DVDs of all the Pixar shorts made so far, and they love both of those, too. Again, they’re pretty neutral theme-wise. Some of them are very boring to the boys (they just don’t “get” Wall-E yet, not even the short one). Anyhow, those “shorts” are great, because you can pick and choose which ones you want to watch, and skip the ones that she doesn’t like or that don’t jive with your personal ethic.

Basically, my boys watch way too much TV these days. It’s cold here, and we’ve all been going through round after round of sickness and traveling a lot, and mama needs her internet time! Hah. TV wise, they love Dinosaur Train, SuperWhy, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, The Cat And The Hat, Curious George– basically the entire PBS morning lineup, so DVDs of those shows are also very popular, and ones that don’t bug me too much. Oh, and the musician in you might enjoy Little Einsteins. It introduces classical composers and art in a mostly non-annoying way, that my kids really dig these days. It’s right up their alley, and I kind of enjoy it myself a bit!

Um, I think that’s about all I’ve got! Clearly, we like kids shows in this house!

Also, “Annie” has a plucky heroine, good songs, lots of little girls dancing, and Carol Burnett.

I totally agree with the Star Trek animated shows. Captain Daddy and I used to watch them on Saturdays in the sad old days when we had nothing else to nourish our sci-fi hunger. They are quite good.

We are big movie lovers in our family, especially me. Three of us are also quite sensitive in various ways. And one of the interesting things is it’s hard to predict what will be scary or overwhelming in a movie for someone.

Star Trek: The Animated Series – Since you mentioned Star Trek, it made me think of this. It seems like a lot of people don’t even know this exists. It’s Kirk and Spock Star Trek, but in half hour animated episodes, all voiced by the original actors. And all new stories too. Jago and I watched through all of them, and we both thought they were pretty awesome. Because it was aimed more at kids, the Kirkness is toned down: no flirting with women, less fist fighting. Actually I can’t remember if there was much fighting at all. As a Star Trek fan, I think these totally stand up.

Babies don’t get diaper rash from wet diapers (or at least, thus is the claim of cloth diaper articles), so it’s not important to change wet diapers promptly. Even for babies where wet diapers do seem to be an issue, a good barrier cream/lotion provides an easy, effective solution.

An occasional picky eater day is not going to affect a toddler’s overall health. They’ll eat more to make up for it at their next meal or on the next day. No older baby/toddler should need to nurse all night to get adequate nutrition. If one does, that’s indicative of a food or medical issue that needs to be diagnosed and addressed, not ignored.

I can’t think of any illness that requires a doctor’s visit that won’t have symptoms that will be easily detectable by daytime observation.

There are some subjective claims that I’m also skeptical of. I think babies and toddlers don’t need bedsharing to build up attachments to their parents given that babies whose parents don’t co-sleep or bedshare attach just fine.

Having had a baby who fit the Dr. Sears traits for high needs pre-sleep training but who no longer does post-sleep training, I suspect that yours would be just as secure during the day if she slept independently as she is with bedsharing and possibly even more so. There’s also a certain amount of natural aging out of the high needs classifications.

Also, the Dr. Sears quote you posted is BS. There’s no reason to believe that nighttime is a scary time for the average infant. That’s just silly. According to the standard sleep books, about 50% of infants are sleeping through the night by six months and around 85% by the end of the first year. If sleeping was typically a scary time for infants, that wouldn’t be the case. Night waking due to night terrors is a toddler issue, not a typical infant issue. Infants generally wake because they need to eat or because they’re at a natural sleep cycle break and haven’t learned to self-soothe back to sleep.

I loved bedsharing with my newborn, but I’d never recommend it with older infants. I think it’s disruptive for older infants’ natural sleep. Infants who bedshare wake more frequently than infants who don’t and having seen the immediate, dramatic transformation in my baby’s sleep once we were able to stop bedsharing, I’m skeptical that there are infants who are better off with bedsharing than independent sleep. The very first night we moved her to her crib, she went from nursing every 1 to 2 hours to sleeping in 5 hour chunks, and by the end of a month, she started sleeping through the night.