Replugged

You may remember that our TV broke when we came back from the beach. (Or you may not, because it was a post I wrote for the DCMoms. Go read it, if you like.) We stayed TV-free for a month, but it was never going to be forever: the new model arrived last week. This one is about an inch bigger than the old one - so still orders of magnitude smaller than the average television in this country - and made by a company whose name we've actually heard of this time, so we're hoping it lasts more than a year before upping and dying on us.

The problem was that TV-free did not equate to screen-free for the children. What happened was that, to buy myself a few minutes' peace, I'd have to let them watch something on my computer, either on YouTube or Netflix. Which meant that

(a) now I couldn't do anything useful on my computer, like blogging or reading blogs or updating Facebook or trying in vain to get one up on the husband in our ongoing Words with Friends tournament, so I was reduced to sweeping the kitchen floor or washing up, which may have been all very nice for our home environment but was not the relaxing time I'd been hoping for;

and (b) instead of watching nice educational PBS channels wherein they enlarge their vocabulary and learn all about manatees and proboscis monkeys and the forces of inertia and the galaxy, the children were becoming hooked on X-Men and My Little Pony.

Yesterday, they both ran up to me to impart some exciting information about how Princess Celestia and Fluttershy had to get their cutie marks or the bad pony would ... and my brain threw up all over the nice clean cerebral coretex so I didn't hear the rest, but I think it's time we weaned them off this blargh. (Yes, the six-year-old boy is totally enthralled by the ponies. I think it's nice, really, because all the Avengers and Spider-Man and X-men cartoons are perhaps a little old for him and people do get blown up or thrown around the place from time to time, but I hope he has the sense to keep this quiet when he gets to First Grade next week. At least around the other macho men of the class.)

So now we have a TV again, but the children are slow to remember their old loves. It's good, really, for now, because letting them use the computer did mean I was paying attention to exactly how much they were watching - the temptation to just leave them where they were happy didn't last for more than two episodes of whatever it was, at most. So the TV isn't being turned on as a matter of course just yet, and since school starts next week for Dash, TV time will (mostly) stay restricted.

Which means that on balance it was a good thing not to have a television for half the summer, even if it did mean I never saw the Olympic opening ceremonies. It's not as if I'd have caught Katie Taylor's winning boxing bouts on NBC anyway.