The Kindergartener, the Threenager, and the Broken TV

My kids have always watched tv. I won’t even pretend to fool you, and say that I am one of those perfect moms who has outlawed television in the house and makes magical cloud glitter playdoh from an organic non toxic Pinterest recipe everyday. Not knocking it, it is just absolutely unrealistic to think that I could do that everyday.

There are some tv shows that I have actually found to be very educational. I loooove me some LeapFrog. And yesterday at the beach, Jace told me he was digging the “Mary-on Trench.” Now, I have never EVER taught him about the Mariana Trench, that was alllll the Octonauts and their special episode on the matter. I won’t lie… my absolute favorite thing about the tv this summer is that Jace thinks he is sneaky when he wakes up in the morning and turns on Netflix all by himself before waking me up when he gets hungry. It’s not sneaky…Josh says I wake up when I hear his hair growing. But I looooove the little bit of extra time in bed in the morning. Yes…there are good things about tv.

But two days ago, I came home from work and hubby wasn’t watching tv. Weird. Then I learned that the tv was “broken.” Actually it wasn’t broken, but we have a 7+ year old PS3 hooked up for Netflix out there and it overheats itself occasionally. Apparently this time it was really hot and wanted to stay off all day. haha. BUT my kids were forced to watch zero tv for 2 days as I didn’t bother to fuss with it and figure out why it wasn’t working.

Here is what happened…

At first, they whined a lot. Jace wanted to watch Pokemon. Zoey wanted to watch Bo on the Go. They complained. But there was quite literally nothing I could do about it. The tv did not work.

So then, they played Pokemon. By which I mean, of course, that they pretended to be little asian monster animals. Zoey’s Pikachu impression is Oscar worthy. And it’s probably more entertaining for me than the actual show! And I didn’t even have to play it with them. I am quite lame now that I am so round, apparently. And all I have to do is explain to them that I can’t crawl around on the floor much right now and they are happy to leave me sipping coffee on the couch. Double score.

Then they whined some more about how they were bored and wanted to watch tv. To which I could still do nothing for them.

So then they played outside on the trampoline. Even though it is like 100+ degrees out. It was short lived, but they played outside for a bit anyway. Normally, they wait for about 6pm when the sun chills out (pun intended) to go out back.

They were forced to play all day long, with absolutely no tv breaks in the middle, as they would usually have. They were also asleep by 8pm.

In other words, I was bummed to lose out on my extra hour of sleep in the morning when my early bird of a son woke up and was bored… but it was really cool to watch their imaginations flourish, without cease, when they would usually take brain breaks and watch tv. It was amazing to see that suddenly, 100 degrees wasn’t too too hot for 30 minutes outside at noon. Jace colors pictures for me everyday (I melt,) but it didn’t seem to phase the kids today as they had to color with no Sofia the First in the background.

Maybe we’ll be taking some extra tv breaks around here. It really wasn’t so bad to lay off the ever convenient babysitter for a couple days. We don’t watch tv all day long, but I will make more of an effort to not let it run in the background anymore either.