Each night Rosie asks to watch Scooby Doo (yes, I have a full season of it from iTunes!) on the "compooter." Almost every night I have to tell her "No, not tonight", even as I understand this will ignite a tantrum. Of course, my reasoning determines that the impending tantrum is well worth my being able to make her dinner (priorities!) instead of hovering to make sure she doesn't delete any "important" files.
Our girls are well aware of what Solitaire on my Palm is - they love to sit with me and watch me flip through the deck of virtual cards over and over and over again until my brain, scrambled from staring at Excel files all day long at work, finally determines that there are indeed, no more moves to make and the game is over.
How do you turn your children away from such mind-numbing gadgetry? Well, the first step is to move yourself away from it! I never thought that we would be a family without television, and yet, here we are 8 months into no TV. Of course, this has not stopped us from watching DVD movies, playing on the PS2, Palm, and of course, the "compooter." Certainly we have continued to entertain ourselves. We have found that life has been more enjoyable without the TV in general. After all, our DVD movies don't have commercials. I don't buy every new-fangled cleaning solution that just appeared on the market and I am not flooded with the knowledge of local clothing store sales......let's just say that is a good thing!
It's not all bad - today my daughters sat on my lap and watched my compooter screen saver rotate through many woodland and other nature scenes. All was calm until a dragonfly was perched on a closed flower bud. I said, "Oh, how pretty!" and Rosie and Lilly both scoffed at me and said, "EEEEEW! A Bug!" Well, it can't all be wonderful, but I still appreciated the cuddles.
Our VCR broke a few weeks ago....we haven't decided if we should fix it or not. At least it wasn't a Beta-Max!
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