Although in my defense, television is really good right now. All the drama and movie channel tv shows are movie quality these days so I don't really watch movies, but I watch television. To add fuel to the fire I was reading "Bottom Line Personal" yesterday and there was an article about the happiest people. One of the points in the article is that happy people don't watch television and the recommendation is to have just one television in your house. We fail that miserably as we have one in almost every room but the kitchen! There will be no television in my kids rooms, let me tell you that?!
So television is my demon and as a result it haunts me with my children and all the studies out there about how kids shouldn't watch television before two and no more than 2 hours a day really speak to me. So in my own life I really try to limit it and not make it a part of our routine in anyway. When Elliot was a newborn and Erik was 20 months old I had to use it constantly for 6 months and have slowly weaned it out of our routine and I like it that way.
Yesterday was a perfect example of why I feel so strongly on this issue. Elliot was sick, Erik was bouncing off the walls and they were both up from their nap by 2:30 pm. Elliot was constantly crying, Erik wanted me to play with him and was craving attention from me in the way that he could never get enough. I was so tempted to turn on the tv again as we had already watch 30 minutes that afternoon because I was just tired and worn out and Erik was exhausting. It was 3:30 when I was feeling this way and I had a long afternoon ahead of me.
Then all of a sudden Erik came up with this insanely creative game. He kept asking me to sit on him. OK, so I sat on him, but I was confused why he kept asking me that. Finally I figured it out, he is the "Erik" name tag on the ground in his preschool. A little background, when we drop off the kids at preschool they are asked to sit on their name until every student arrives. So Erik is pretending he was the letters of his name, and I was pretending to be Erik and I needed to sit on him until Mrs. Zook told us it was time to go outside and play.
The game deviated and turned into chase the name tag to grab it to put it back on. Then we morphed outside and started playing "shark" and Elliot asked me to go down the slide with him several times. Erik was just full of creative ideas as the afternoon wore on. As a matter of fact he was on such a creative role, that he put on a concert for us during dinner. He stood with a paper in his hand and pretending to read it and sing songs. The show included, "Wheels on the Bus," "Route 66" and so many made up songs I could barely tell you all of them.
This is my point, if I had given into the desire to put on that television as I so desperately wanted, I was robbing Erik of this opportunity to be bored and being bored is so important. By being bored he used his mind to think of something creative and imaginative and had so much fun. I think he had more fun doing that then he would have had watching a movie or television show. So I say let my kids be bored, whine a little, but almost always something good comes out of it.
So I will probably always battle this demon, but from my own personal perspective and as a reminder to myself, I am much happier when I spend my time editing pictures and blogging when the boys nap than when I am watching a tv show. As a matter of fact since we went to Hawaii I have so much left over tv on my dvr I haven't even begun to catch up, I am stupidly proud of that for me.
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