I confess! I let my toddler nephews watch Futurama!

As is obvious by now, I adore my nephews. I spend hours watching cartoons and crawling in the floor with them. Kaia and I go "splorin" (exploring) at least once a week. We have a great little walking park across from our apartment and I take him out there with my dog and we walk and talk about trains and trees and cars and the road and grass and why the creek is dirty and whatever else comes to us.

And I spend ungodly amounts of time trying to sneak into Alo's room so I can jump out and say RA! and make him laugh. Of course, I only succeed in getting him to jump once in every twenty or thirty attempts. I, apparently, have a giggling gene attached to my sneaking gene. They just don't mesh well.

At any rate, I spoil them rotten and I'm quite shameless about it. Kids deserve to be adored, and I take my Auntly right to spoil quite seriously. Each morning, Kaia sneaks into my room and wakes me up. He does it so sweetly, I can't help but get over my "I hate mornings" attitude.

He opens the door and whispers "Nanny." As soon as my eyes pop open, he closes the door and flies across the floor to jump into the bed beside me, smiling like he's having the best day ever. I pull the covers back and he crawls in and asks what I'm doing. I inform him that I'm waking up and he grins quite shamelessly and tells me that it's time to watch cartoons with him. And so we do. Every morning. It's our routine, and we both love it.

Until just a few short months ago, I only ever allowed him to watch PBS Sprout cartoons. All of the bad things one finds in cartoons just bothered me. I saw absolutely no point in allowing a three year old to watch cartoon characters clobber one another or shoot at one another or any other such thing that cartoons do.

Lately, however, my perceptions have changed quite drastically. Kaia is, as sad as it is to admit it, growing up. His favorite sentence now is "Tell me about this."

He says it all the time and about everything. He's so full of curiosity, you can't help but tell him everything you possibly can about whatever it is he is asking about. He takes it quite seriously and he doesn't forget. What I told him three months ago about a cartoon, a toy, a household item, an article of clothing, he still remembers today.

One day, his mommy upset him because she was trying to calm his brother down and couldn't play with him. He came to me for a little attention. I was in bed with a killer headache, but I couldn't turn him away. I never can. Headaches are one thing he learned about early on, so when Nanny says she has a headache, he's on his best behavior. And I just can't, even then, tell him that I won't play with him.

He asked to watch cartoons so we curled up on my bed to see what we could find. I'd taken his stack of movies out of my room that morning and didn't particularly have the energy to go retrieve one, so I started flipping channels.

Being late at night there were no kid cartoons on basic cable. It was Adult Swim or nothing. I cringed, sat up, felt my brain trying to remove itself from my skull and said to hell with it. Watching Futurama once couldn't possibly turn him into one of those ill behaved little terrors that people still insist on calling children.

We watched Futurama that night. And I quickly began to rethink our entire don't let him watch anything except PBS Sprout cartoons rule. I'd never watched Futurama prior to watching it with him, so I had no clue what we were in for. It's definitely not something one lets a three year old watch by himself. It was a learning experience, to say the least.

And surprisingly enough, that is exactly what made me rethink my stance on the cartoon viewing. As I've mentioned, Kaia is an inquisitive little thing. He asks questions constantly and about everything. Futurama was no different.

We ended up discussing in whispers things I'd never even considered discussing with a three year old in such a way before simply because they'd never come up. He asked questions about everything and I answered him, breaking it down into terms a three year old could understand. I wasn't sure how it was going until he went back to his mommy.

She came marching in not long later to ask what the heck "Tuturama" was. I told her and she informed me that Kaia was telling her that "Vendy" (Bender) didn't like hu-mans but changed his mind because some hu-mans like Fry was nice to him so he didn't let them other bots kill the hu-mans. And then them bots decided they liked hu-mans because dose hu-mans bringed them nuts that they needed to be happy.

I'm just staring at her at this point, not sure if I should laugh because she's telling me what he said in Kaia speak or if I should hide because the entire don't let them watch anything but PBS Sprout had become the rule around here. At any rate, she then says that Kaia went on to say that we should be nice to bots and other hu-mans too because we don't like it when they mean to us and that it's not nice to hurt people even if we don't likes them.

Kaia reappears at that moment and then must repeat the lesson for both of us. We just looked at one another and then shrugged and not much else was said about it that night. The next afternoon, his cousin, Jayden, came up with my mom and her boyfriend and he repeated the lesson to him after Jayden wouldn't play with Alo. We have to be nice to other people because they do nice stuff for us and we don't like it when they hurt us or be mean to us.

Kaia and I now watch "Tuturama" every weeknight when it comes on Comedy Central (freaking Adult Swim didn't want it anymore) and I recently bought him the Futurama movie. He runs into my room when it gets dark outside to ask if it's time to watch "Tuturama" and talk. It never is, but he waits patiently. And when it is time, we pile up on the bed with our apple slices and our milk and the show starts. And every time, he looks at me and says "Tell me about this."

And I do. He then shares those lessons with his mommy and his little brother. And when he goes to my mom's, he shares them with her and Jerry and Jayden and grandma.

We're slowly expanding our cartoon viewing to other things and each new cartoon or each new episode brings with it another lesson. We've slowly introduced Power Rangers and he's taken those lessons to heart as well. He has a magic sword (which is actually a flyswat that he found at the store one day) and he and his little brother protect all of us mere humans from bad guys that want to hurt us. Kaia jumps around yelling "Dino! Dino!" with his sword in hand while Alo claps and waves his hands and laughs. And when they've worn themselves out, we all pile up in the floor in Alo's room or pile up on the couch and talk about what being good people means.

I've realized in the last few months that it's not what they watch, but how they watch it. Sitting them in front of the television and calling it a day doesn't work. But, sitting down with them and using those cartoons, even those you'd never have considered proper viewing material, as a time to talk about what they're seeing and what it means can work. We still run into bumps in the road. Just recently we watched part of American History X as I discussed here and I had no clue where to begin. I tried anyway and he came away having learned something from the experience too. Other times, I don't know exactly how to answer his questions so that he will understand, so we try a different lesson.

We did the same thing with Sprout cartoons, but it never really clicked before that it's not what they watch, but how it's presented that makes the difference. Who knew Futurama would be such a learning experience?

Apparently though, we're never too old to learn and you can turn anything, with the right mindset and attention, into something useful. I've learned just as much from this entire experience as has Kaia. Alo, I'm not too sure about. He doesn't communicate much yet, but I think he is listening. And hopefully one day he too will pass on those lessons to the other children in his life.

Sis and hubby and I rest easy about them viewing cartoons and shows that aren't tailored specifically for toddlers because we know that the lessons they soak in and pass on aren't the same things that so many other kids pass on. Kaia has not yet come away and simply took what he saw on TV and run with it. Instead, he takes what we've explained to him about what he saw on TV and what we've told him in response to his questions and passed that on. There will inevitably be mistakes, but that's okay too. Sometimes what it takes to really learn a lesson is the ability to screw up and see it from the other side.

And that is something I can certainly appreciate. I'm not perfect either, no one is. And it's just good to know that when they do screw up, they'll have our guidance and those lessons to fall back on and won't be floundering out there alone, wondering why what they did was wrong or what they need to do to fix it. That's missing far too often for kids, and we all pay for it in the end.