First of all, you have to know that we have not watched actual television, broadcast or cable, in our house for over five years. We shut it off the week after our military entered Iraq, back in March of 2003. Never turned it on again, except for space shuttle launches and landings, and approaching hurricanes. Besides that, we just watch videos that we rent through the mail from N*tflix.

So we decided early this year that we would break our TV fast for the Olympics. We are not sports fans by any stretch, but we both enjoy watching the Olympics. I had a chance to visit the venues in Lake Placid shortly before the 1980 Winter Games, and caught the Olympic bug at that time. So, I am always enthusiastic about the Olympics (although we didn't watch them at all in 2004 or 2006).

Anyway, Friday we watched the awesome opening ceremony all the way through until midnight, and our kids stayed up for the spectacle. For them, the spectacle wasn't simply the ceremony, but the whole "TV experience", not the least of which is the commercials. Not being used to TV, the children were perturbed by the frequent cutting over to commercials at high interest critical moments of programming. Now, DH and I have grown used to this over our lifetimes, but the kids found it quite aggravating, and they vocalized their opinion over this.

"OH NO! Another commercial!"

"We just saw this one!" (for P*blix supermarkets)

"Not again!!"

and my personal favorite: "ARRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!"

Well, the frequent reoccurrence of about 20 or so commercials since Friday evening has continued to be a continual joke amongst our family. The beginning of the commercials are now met by comments like

"Oh I know this one!", (they are such TV experts already, since Friday)

or

"This is funny!"

among cackles and shrieks of delight, especially for the commercial for Kr*ft Macaroni and Cheese Cr*ckers when the cheese geyser erupts under the unsuspecting child. Over and over again. Giggle, giggle, laugh, laugh.

It is kind of funny. Not the commercials, but my childrens' experience / reaction to them.

When the parade of athletes was going on, this was a neat review of the Geography Songs CD that we listened to last winter. Some of the Pacific island countries completely stumped us. It was very disturbing to see that Taiwan was not permitted to carry their own flag. The kids got excited to see athletes from the countries of their birth. My son eagerly awaited the contingent from Viet Nam. They sent about 15 athletes, and the commentator mentioned that although the Vietnamese hadn't really been winners of Olympic medals in the past, they were a force to be reckoned with in the Math Olympics! We were happy to jump all over that fact, as Math is not my DS' favorite subject.


My daughter was happy to see the athletes from South Korea, some 350 strong. She was full of grins, too, when the young Mr. Park won a swimming gold medal for South Korea.




An aside: what is it with beach volleyball, anyway? It seems that they spend half the time just showing that! (Don't answer that question, I think I can guess..)

So, my kids have gotten the idea to stick U.S. flags around the room on dowels, or to hold them and wave them when the USA is winning or getting a medal, and then they lower them to half mast when the USA isn't doing so good. Where do they get these ideas?
They are also being exposed to new terms, like vaulting, uneven parallel bars, balance beam, etc. 'Tis a shame; we non-athletic parents haven't exposed them to much of this stuff.

How great is the potential for us to become TV-holics? Take yesterday afternoon, for instance. Mid-afternoon found me sitting in the recliner feeling very lazy, watching swimming races. This is such an unusual scene in our house. DH got bored with this and disappeared outside to do something with the tractor. Turned out he sharpened the Bush Hog blades. My son got bored, too, and went outside to play. My daughter, who takes to TV more readily than her brother, hung around a little bit, and then decided to go outside to join her brother. This left me, sitting drowsily in the chair, feeling quite brain dead and extremely lazy. It reminded me far too much of days past when I was growing up with my parents. And part of me said - are you crazy? Don't you feel guilty? Look at you, sitting like a lazy lump in your chair while these incredible swimmers are slicing through water! What are you doing!!?? And at that point, I got up, got dressed in my swimsuit and did laps in my pool. It sure felt good to move. That led into dinner, violin practice, and the entire evening ritual. We didn't watch the Olympics again until 9 p.m.

I guess our family isn't cut out for daytime TV, not even on the weekends. Nevertheless, we have a lot of exciting evening viewing of the Olympics to look forward to, and it is double the fun with our kids.

NEWS FLASH: The UPS truck is here delivering our new homeschool room table. Gotta go!

I saw the symptoms before affluenza became a known buzzword. Before I was a mom myself. I saw kids who were never satisfied, and the older they got, the bigger the thrills they needed. I spoke to a dad of a 3 year old in my neighborhood who said to me one day "If you think it is hard to keep them happy when they are babies, just wait. It gets really hard when they're three!" Hmmm. I tucked that comment in my brain for pondering. We live near the world's biggest tourist attraction. I mean 42 square miles of ultimate entertainment -- the biggest mouse-related theme park and vacation kingdom there is. I knew kids in my neighborhood who, at age 10 or 12, had gotten bored with going there. Didn't want to "do D*SN*Y" anymore. Boring.

This is insane!! What is going on here? I have since learned it is called affluenza. A disease that is bred by the affluence we enjoy here in our country. We have the resources, so lets give all we've got to the kids. For better or for worse. So I thought about what effect this overstimulation of kids with entertainment and activities would have on them. It bothered me so much, that at some point when my oldest was still a toddler, I saw the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, and decided to change our path. My dh understood the problem immediately, and he was on board as well.

Since then, we have made a deliberate decision not to overstimulate our kids. Keep life simple and natural. Toys we chose were simpler, we tried to avoid logos and name brands, we shyed away from characters of all sorts (which are just ways of getting kids to recognize a brand at an early age). We stopped watching TV, and therefore, TV commercials. We tried to eliminate every aspect of commercialism that we could from our home. We minimized electronic toys and gadgets, for ourselves as well as the kids. We dish out computer game time in very sparing doses.

Now the kids don't know what they are supposed to want for Christmas. They just know what they like.

We heard of a family that gave their kids three gifts per child for Christmas. After all, Jesus himeself received three gifts. We did this each Christmas, and found that they still ended up with too much stuff. (this past Christmas, we loosened this rule to allow for stocking items and educational items as extras. Since we don't buy them gifts all year round, except birthday and Christmas, we find we need to stock up a bit on those educational items).

I know. By now you think we are very odd. Just keep reading. Horror of horrors -- we never take the children to any of the world famous theme parks that we are "privileged" to live nearby. We tried it once, when my oldest was 4. He couldn't handle the stimulation, and had repeated meltdowns in the park. We decided we wouldn't do it again for years to come, and we haven't.

Theme parks are like Fr*tos or L*y's Potato Chips to a child's sensibilities. Once they get a couple of experiences of them, it grays out all other more subtle life experiences. Especially when you live right near those theme parks. No other place quite measures up. We want to avoid that. There is plenty of time for them, when they are older.

We approach every event, every vacation trip, from the point of view of how much it could overstimulate our children. Because when you overstimulate, and overstimulate, and overstimulate, pretty soon it takes more, and more, and more to provide the same thrill anymore. Life itself gets duller and duller. We human beings are made that way.

We talk to the kids about being wise consumers, and avoiding the pitfalls that advertising set up. Recognizing a gimmick when you see one. Does this toy really look like it did on the cover of the box? Isn't it just a bunch of little plastic pieces and stickers to put on? Where does the fun come from? YOU! You can make your own fun.

I hear parents comment often in amazement about how their youngest children were alway initially more enthralled with the box than they were with the toy the box contained. We parents (and grandparents) are the ones who teach them to crave the toys. This doesn't have to be. They really can make their own fun, and should be required to, now and them. It is so good for them to be understimulated more. This is the classic case of less is better.

So, we remain low key in every area of the children's lives. Lives as commercial free as possible. As a result, they really do know how to make their own fun. They have a blast playing with blankets hanging over things. Exploring nature in our yard. Pretending together for hours. We read so many family read aloud books, so they have the ideas they need to create pretend play. Now that the door of reading is being unlocked to our younger child, I have caught them in the same room both reading their own books. It is a very rare time when they report that they are bored. Maybe once every couple of months.

Vacations are getting simpler and more frequent. We have stopped the nice hotels, and integrated camping into our lives. It took some getting used to, and we had to build up some new planning, packing and camping skills, but now we really love it. Vacation destinations are nature-based now. Mountains, scenery, state parks. The kids love it because they love nature.

Did I mention that my kids almost never have nightmares? (if I could just say the same about nosebleeds!)

Now, if you can find a down side, it is this. My kids are very sensitive to stimulation. Sometimes, we are watching a DVD, and if the movie is less than, say, 20 or 25 years old, it can be very stimulating. The scene changes at a frenetic pace, the action is non-stop, and it is difficult to always know what is happening. My kids, especially the 5 year old, don't care for this. My youngest has had a couple of nightmares in her life, and they have always (always!) occurred after a movie that I later regretted letting them watch. Yes, these are G-rated movies. They are just very stimulating, because folks demand that nowadays.

Tonight, we are going to do something that is unusual for us. My husband's work group has provided a fun night out. There will be S*nny's Bar-B-Q served for supper(yum!) and then a minor league baseball game, topped off with fireworks. We've never done anything like this before. We are looking forward to it, because it is such a rare experience, a big deal for our family. I'll post about how it goes.

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This is pretty neat. As some of you know, we are a TV-free family. The only time the TV is on is for one rented DVD a week (maybe two on some weeks, but usually one). We have a TV set that my dh was given as a gift back in 1991, and of course it is analog, so we have to convert it to digital or else it will go black in the winter, as you all have heard by now.



So we signed up online for the coupon that our Government has agreed to provide, and a month later, we ordered the box online for a grand total of $2.99 plus $8.99 s/h.

For awhile, I just thought this was a black box that would just keep our TV useable after February. But upon reading my local paper, I discovered that there are digital channels that were available to us as no cost through the airwaves. Hmmm. Are we missing something? While at my friend's house this week, she mentioned that she heard the picture quality would be better, too.

We plan to break our 5 year TV fast in eight days. We want the children to be able to watch the Olympics. But we have no cable, no satellite dish, and no aerial antenna. All we have is a wire attached to the back of our TV and hung on the adjacent wall with a push pin. We never really worried about this, because we didn't need it. Oh, and we do live somewhat in the sticks. So, we have virtually no reception on any major channel except one, and a couple of UHF channels. But, who cared?

We thought we might need to go out and buy an indoor antenna to get the Olympics.

So, I said to my dh last night: why don't we install the black box, and see if it helps anything? So he did, and, what do you know? It scanned and found 32 channels (who knew?) and they are all crystal clear. Besides all the major networks, we get a channel for the local university, several public TV channels, various weather channels provided by the major networks, educational channels and several Spanish speaking and Christian channels. All this, with on screen program guide, parental controls, program descriptions, and much of the interactivity that used to be reserved just for subscribers to digital TV. Every channel is perfectly clear (with no antenna) and it is free!

So I thought that was neat enough to blog about. Although, it still ain't gonna make a TV addict out of me (because I've since become an internet addict) it is neat to have access to a couple of 24 hour weather channels now. So, if you've been meaning to order that black box, go ahead.

You may be surprised at the results.

p.s. This is a time for our family to be careful. Don't want to keep the TV going after the Olympics are over, ykwim? These past several years, the only time it ever went on was for space shuttle launches / landings, hurricanes and tornadoes, and presidential inaugurations.