Turn off the TV week

This morning I read in the paper that National Turn Off Your TV Week starts tomorrow.  Even though I generally shy away from anything quite so bandwagonish, we're going to participate.  There are a few things I feel strongly about and not letting my children grow up to passively waste away their lives sitting in front of the TV is definitely one of them.  Just ask me if our kids will ever have TV's or computers in their own rooms?  (On a cold day in hell!)

Part of my TV fear is that I am completely and totally addicted to television myself.  And so is Dave.  We will NOT be turning off the TV ourselves this week since it's our favorite form of after-the-kids-are-asleep entertainment, a fact about which we have zero shame.  We LOVE TV.  (In fact we're shopping for a big gaudy 46" LCD right now).   

But when it comes to the kids, we're obviously more careful.  I'm sure you might have noticed, but one thing I'm pretty confident we didn't pass on to our children is the THIN gene.  So avoiding television is pretty obvious for our family.  Right now I usually turn it off mid-morning and don't let the kids watch anything again until it's time for me to make dinner.  But even though I turn it off, the kids are still watching too much TV, enough that I know every episode of Lazy Town by heart.

This should be an interesting week!

Comments

[Amy]

Something I saw once in a copy of the ensign was where a mother to get her children away from the TV instituted a rule that each child got one free hour of TV a day, and that even if a show was the choice of only one of her children but both watched it, it counted for BOTH of the children. Then the children could do an hour of service or physical activity or various things and each hour would earn them an extra 15 minutes of tv time but all told they could not exceed two hours per day of tv time.
And having read my way down to here. I should note that I don't know how to leave a recipe alone myself.
My hubby recently got us a copy of a cookbook his mother has, which I can't remember, from which my frosting recipe came orginally. I discovered much to my surprise that the recipe I use only vaguely resembles the original. I use double the butter (two sticks, and I actually use margarine), two ounces more cream cheese than I should (becuase let's face it, it's easier to use 8 ounces than 6) and twice the vanilla as called for in the orginal recipe(two tablespoons and sometimes when teh mood strikes ane extra for good measure). The only thing I didn't change was using 4 cups of powdered sugar. But when I made it chocolate, I found that I was only suppossed to substiute a fourth cup cocoa for sugar and I'd done a half.
Ohw ell.... I like my way pretty well and frosting wasn't meant to be a health food anyway!
-- Amy

[Angela Langowski]

I really enjoy your columns and miss the Naked Ledger. Why won't you be writing your Disney column anymore?

[Jessica]

I'm with you! My husband and I are total TV addicts and I cannot wait for my kids to go to bed at night so I can settle in and watch some while I do dishes, fold laundry, or blog! We have a DVR so we record anything we might want to watch so we don't have to pay attention to what time shows ACTUALLY come on.

[watch lost online]

You seem to have got the niche from the root, Awesome work