If there’s one thing we can be confident of, it’s that our children are ready for prime time.  Prime time, and also Saturday morning cartoons, daytime soap operas, movie time, late night, and pretty much every other time slot in our great American cable television culture.  Allow me to illustrate:

I’m sure Nic was in the big chair at the time, or he’d have sitting right next to Dexter, probably with Trouble, another hippo, and quite possibly a car or two.

For the last two weeks, we’ve been trying hard to cut the television out of our daily routine.  We’d never intended it to become part of the boys daily life, but once they caught sight of the first episode of Thomas the Tank Engine it was all over.  Whenever they passed through the family room they’d point to the TV and yell “Choo Choo!”  Or Dexter would come and grab my hand, drag me over to the chair, point at it, and once I sat down, climb up into my lap, point at the TV, and yell “Choo Choo!”  And being the absentee parent that I am, it’s pretty hard not to try and assuage my guilt by giving in, and stealing a few quiet minutes of cuddle time while Dexter ignored me utterly and watched Thomas.

It started as a Sunday night thing, then a “because you’re sick” thing, before gradually insinuating itself into our nightly pre-bed routine.  One it began it’s invasion of our pre-dinner time, it was time to do something about it.  I suggested to Katie, on July 31st, that perhaps we should make August a TV-free month.  Bizarrely, she agreed.  The first two days the boys yelled for the TV time and time again, but by the middle of the week they were getting over it.  The house was calmer, and we were getting some of our chores done and clearing out the to-do list, and the boys were playing more and having lots of fun.  Saturday night Katie insisted that she needed a reward, and so after the boys went to bed we cheated and watched Eureka.  The next morning, we rewarded the boys with 20 minutes of Thomas.  Okay, I could handle that.  We kept on into the second week, going fairly strong, having only cheated once each.

Then Tuesday comes along.  The boys are a bit manic, and we decide to go for a walk in the evening.  We decide to stroll down to another playground by our house, one we hadn’t visited yet, and see how the boys like it.  The walk lasted may 20 minutes.  By the time we got back, we had 4 skinned knees, two skinned elbows, 4 skinned knuckles, one skinned palm, and one large welt forming on a forehead.  Note to self: insist that the boys wear pants when going for walks, possibly also head gear and gauntlets.  Seriously, I never knew walking could be that dangerous.  When we got home we turned on Thomas, partially to get the boys to sit still long enough for us to wipe off the blood and get the band-aids on, and partially to bribe them into trusting us again.  Gotta love the persistent ever-overwhelming feelings of parental guilt.

We got back into the routine after that night with the boys, though last night after too many hours outside in the heat we decided that “move night” was actually probably a really good idea, to help everyone cool off and calm down before bed.  We put in “Cars”, and Nicholas started crying during the car crash scene in the first 5 minutes.  We can’t win.

We have two weeks to go.  Katie seduced me into cheating with a couple of shows when we were exhausted last Thursday and Friday night.  I feel corrupted.  Maybe I should take bets on how much the TV will be on by the end of the month…  It really is insidious, isn’t it?

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