Blogger's Block

What I was afraid of would happen already has -- I went for a week without a blog entry! Last week was intensely busy with Cub Scout Day Camp all week 4-8PM and the kids were still in school, their last week, and believe it or not even had a project due on Wednesday! OK, so not so much "blogger's block" as no time.

I've known for some time that we have the TV on entirely too much in our house. The kids come home from school and immediately pop the TV on. We've programmed the downstairs TV to require a code, but the other TVs in the house don't have that same capacity and I don't stay on the situation enough to make a dent in the TV addiction. I'm very tempted to take all the TVs out of the house, but then how will *I* be able to watch TV? There are always full episodes streaming online ... :-)

What's driving this is, in short, mouthiness and unwillingness to change gears from that to any number of other worthwhile things. When summer came, even though the kids weren't done with year-round school, I got very lax because I was so glad that soccer, football, basketball, piano, and other classes were DONE!! and let them watch more TV -- and now it's out of control and the mouthiness -- whew! 3rd grade with a girl has been very hard on MOM! But, I know she sounds just like all the happy faces on Disney Channel and other "wholesome" TV channels -- not.

I decided to make a budget for the kids to choose to watch TV from. I'm going to allow up to 1/2 hour of "garbage" TV M-F and up to 1 hour from the approved list (the approved list is shows pulled from TLC, History channel, and Discovery). "Garbage" is anything else. Each child has their own sheet to circle their choices and/or write in their "garbage" choice. It took a little time to set up the spreadsheet, but hopefully will be easier to update. It does take some time, though, because I have to go through TV Guide online to pull the programming for these channels. In the future I will probably be able to just print the grid preferences straight from the TV Guide site and save myself the trouble, but I need to make it as easy as possible for the kids to see the choices and empower them to make their choices. And, I realize the total time they could possibly choose is still excessive. It won't work on the days they have activities, but we'll have to sort that all out, shifting to a new paradigm is more important right now than tightening the screws completely.

Kids have been with their dad for a long weekend so we'll see how well it goes when we unveil the plan tomorrow now!

P.S. We've watched a few DVD rentals lately and in several of them people were smoking. What's up with that?! Seems like a new trend to show smoking in movies again.