Unplugged

I found myself sitting in front of the entertainment unit which used to hold our TV / DVD player, wondering "what now?". About 2 minutes later, Terry came into the room and pronounced something like "well, are you ready to get spanked again?" I smiled. Not the usual reaction when someone declares a spanking is in order, but I knew he was referring to my almost ridiculous loss of "Sorry" which we had played the night before; he was offering a chance to re-live my defeat again tonight. Bring it on!

You might have guessed we've changed our entertainment ways lately. We not only cancelled the cable (which didn't matter anyhow since it didn't really leave our house regardless of cancelling it), but we also completely removed the TV from the livingroom and stored it in the cellar for an indefinite period of time. We had been talking about decreasing our TV time, but it seemed a little more difficult than expected since the boys have grown tall enough to reach the knobs to open the doors and smart enough to know which buttons to press in order to elicit their own noisy entertainment. It had to be completely removed. So we did. And then I breathed a great big sigh of relief that just one more source of noise had been removed from my living space ... and then I thought, "okay, what do we do now?"

Well, we read. And we play games. And we get things done that have been hanging over our heads for a while. And we talk. And we go to bed at a decent hour instead of being held hostage until the show we're watching is over. And the boys play more and go outside more and do more things in the kitchen with me. And it's quieter here ... okay, not a LOT quieter because, let's face it, I have twin toddlers who seem to have no sense of volume and do everything at the highest possible decibel, but still, it's better.

Do I delude myself into thinking it will stay this way forever? Of course not. That was never the intent. The plan is to rethink what's important to us so that, when it returns, we won't think it's an easy solution but, hopefully, more of a nuisance that we'll choose to shut off in favour of quality time together instead. We'll have found a better way to spend our time. We have an idea of the life we want to have and, I'm happy to say, the TV plays a pretty insignificant role in it.