One of my worst parenting decisions began with an innocent visit to the library. After exhausting our personal book collection, I had decided to broaden my two-year-old's literary horizons. We headed to the children's room; overwhelmed by the thousands of choices, I pulled a few random books from the "Recommended Winter Reads" shelf.
My toddler surveyed her options and reached for a garish purple hardcover depicting a family of pigs frolicking in the snow. "Oh, you want to read the one about the piggies?" I asked with a smile, oblivious of the horror that was to come.
"Piggy," she confirmed, and we settled on a beanbag to start reading.
Within minutes, I was regretting my choice. But it was too late—the toddler was hooked. "More Peppa," she requested as soon as I finished. We read the story again. Then once more. Then, we roamed the shelves looking for more Peppas, and left the library with an armful of colorful titles like "Good Night, Peppa!" and "Peppa Pig and the Vegetable Garden."
In the subsequent weeks, we read our new acquisitions over and over, and I developed a strong and lasting hatred for Peppa Pig.
For one, the books were an eyesore, with illustrations straight from the pen of a lazy fifth-grader. The animal characters resembled malformed stick figures; also, they all looked the same. Don't believe me? Just take a look at Peppa and her little brother George. They're literally clones of each other. I'm not exaggerating—without context, there is absolutely no way to differentiate between the two.
As for the adult pigs, they're just larger versions of Peppa: Mummy Pig is a taller Peppa with eyelashes. Grandma Pig is Mummy Pig with white eyelashes. Daddy Pig is Mummy Pig with glasses, a beard, and a beer belly. You get the picture.
And if the illustrations were bad, the stories were worse. And by "stories" I mean inane, interminable play-by-plays of Peppa's day at school, or in the garden, or skiing down Snowy Mountain. Nothing happens in Peppa stories, and yet they go on FOR-EV-ER. You have to feel bad for the poor souls tasked with writing the book jacket copy, who clearly try to do their best to inject some drama into the mind-numbing plots:
"George doesn't want to eat salad. Will Grandpa Pig think of a solution?"
"Richard drops his toy into the pool. What will his mother do?"
Suffice it to say, these cliffhangers did not inspire me to keep reading. However, keep reading I did, over and over and over again, because my daughter was obsessed. And I saw that her love for Peppa was beginning to yield some dividends. If she was dawdling at bedtime, all it took was a reminder that we'd be reading Peppa soon to get her back on track. If she didn't want to eat her salad, I reminded her that Peppa and George ate their salads (Spoiler alert: Grandpa Pig did think of a solution). Even her vocabulary expanded, as she began requesting to go skating like Peppa, wear floaties like Peppa, plant seeds like Peppa, and so on.
So, Peppa and I reached an unsteady truce. I kept a constant supply of the books at home courtesy of our library. Every day at naptime and bedtime, I'd faithfully recite Peppa's adventures to my bewitched toddler (by this point, I knew each story by heart).
And then, I made a frightening discovery. "Peppa Pig" wasn't just a book series. It was, first and foremost, a TV show.
When the first video popped up in our YouTube recommendations, my daughter immediately spotted it and began chanting "Peppa! Peppa video!" I paused, hovering uncertainly by the screen. Could I really deal with a talking, moving Peppa?
"Want Peppa video watch!" my daughter demanded indignantly, pulling on my sleeve. I caved and put it on. It's just five minutes, I reasoned. How bad could it be?
Alas, it turned out that animated Peppa was exponentially more annoying than Peppa on the printed page. I hated it all, from the constant snorting of the entire porcine cast of characters to Peppa's whining, to the superfluous narrator intoning commentary like, "Peppa likes swinging. Everybody likes swinging."
But my toddler was mesmerized. And, after discovering that Peppa also lived on TV it was the only show she wanted to watch.
As a parent, I try to respect my daughter's wishes and let her make choices wherever appropriate. She barely gets any TV time; if she wanted to spend it watching Peppa, who was I to stop her? Peppa is uber-annoying seemed like a weak reason to ban the pig from our YouTube repertoire, especially since my child did not seem to share my disgust. And that's how our twice-daily literary visits with Peppa expanded to include several Peppa videos each week.
As I write this, my husband is finishing bath time. In a few minutes, I will be called upstairs to read bedtime stories, and, inevitably, those stories will include that addictive, obnoxious toddler catnip: Peppa Pig. While I read, I will try to entertain myself by pondering questions like "Doesn't Peppa's head look like a hair dryer?" and "How can Miss Rabbit, ever the consummate businesswoman, operate the supermarket, the ice cream shop, the ski shop, and the skate shop simultaneously without any employees?" Then, my daughter will drift off to sleep, no doubt dreaming of Peppa, and I will retreat to my room, grateful to leave the entire Pig family behind...at least until tomorrow.