shelves

So my daughter has reached this point where she loves to push buttons. I mean, I get it. I pretty much push buttons for a living. It's been fascinating to watch her quickly discern which buttons (and, by extention, which game controllers) are the ones worth touching. Generally speaking, whichever controller or button or device my wife and I are touching the most is the thing she wants the most.

As toddlers are, I'm told, tiny people, it's been really wild to watch her grow. She's walking around now, which really just gives her more access to more buttons. She's no longer enthralled by the tiny fake phone that plays bootleg songs from Frozen and bootleg iPhone ringtones when she slams the buttons on the front. Now she wants remote controls and game controllers. She's already tired of the buttons (well, "buttons") on the front of the launch Xbox Ones I still have sitting under the non-gaming TVs of this household. She demands more.

This eventually turned into her grabbing any game controller she could get her hands on, which would keep her occupied for awhile. The first one of those ended up being the original Xbox Elite controller, which is probably the exact wrong controller to give to a baby since its sticks and D-pad pop right off, forming a dangerous (but very well-made) choking hazard. After removing all the removables, it worked out pretty well for a few weeks. It was solid and, most importantly, it wasn't hooked up to anything. But that didn't hold, either. She craves a new level of chaos.

I think that chaos really started to ramp up once I got the new consoles in and connected here in my office. She was already familiar with the power button on the old Xbox One, so finding the same button on the Xbox Series X was easy. I didn't have too much of a problem with her turning the Series X on and off again as, well, it seems like a pretty resiliant piece of technology. It can take it. Maybe that's me prescribing some kind of quiet strength to the console because of its visual stoutness.

The other two items on that shelf are a PlayStation 5 and my home receiver, a rapidly aging Denon AVR-S730H. These are disasters, by comparison. The PlayStation 5, it seems, was mostly designed to be looked at from a distance and is not here to be aggressively touched. At most, you are to gracefully insert a disc into its slot (something I still haven't done, while we're talking about it) and immediately avert your eyes before it throws some kind of firmware error or, more likely, before a baby puts a bit of weight on the top or front of it, shoving it just enough to cause it to pop off of its horizontal stand. While I like the way the PlayStation 5 looks like the type of building that should be erected next to Tokyo Big Sight and viewed as the far-flung future of architecture, it is not the most stable platform as far as babies and their hands are concerned. At least the last batch of firmware and software updates seems to have lessened the number of crashes I've been getting while the thing is actually turned on. Also nice: the all-black front of the unit means that my daughter hasn't yet discovered where that power button is.

That leaves the receiver, which, like all good audio receivers, emits a satisfying "pop" noise every time it turns on and off. It also has the most buttons on the front of it, leaving my daughter a billion different ways to screw it up. This has manifested in situations like "the time when I was trying to buy Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 but she kept changing the input over to something else or just turning the whole thing off completely" and "the time I thought maybe I could put in a little Astro's Playroom speedrun time but that was a stupid thing to think."

As far as controllers goes, that's where the PS5 reigns supreme. She has abandoned all of the various Xbox controllers in this office and really only wants to get her hands on the DualSense. She knows exactly which button to hit to turn the controller (and the console) on, and any time my back is turned or if I've left the controller within reach, she's got it. While the science is still happening over here and we still have a lot of data to analyze, the early results suggest that the PS5 is the best console for babies, but perhaps only the third best consumer electronics device on the market, trailing behind the Denon AVR-S730H and my iPhone, which she is very good at locking me out of by entering incorrect passcodes at an alarming rate.

While writing this, I looked over and discovered that she had turned on the PlayStation 5, logged me in, and downloaded the Disney+ app. The other day she almost signed us up for a $50 ESPN subscription on the Roku. The message is clear--I need to bolt shelves to every single wall in this house and move everything up about five feet.