To TV or Not to TV?

According to my son Chad, the worst thing that could ever happen to a 6 year old is to see more than one Cablevision truck outside your home.  Waking up and finding 5 Cablevision trucks outside your home is cause for panic.  Walking into your den, still holding your blue teddy named Ten, finding the beloved remote control, relishing the touch of the smooth power button under your finger, aiming at the TV with more purpose than an Olympian going for a world record and then pressing the life line to our 60 inch behemoth and seeing ... nothing -- catastrophic.  Worse than nothing, a black screen with nothing?  Call 911.  No sound.  No signs of life.  Silence.  Get the paddles.

Chad literally passed out from shock.

When his first breath came back and his big beautiful brown eyes opened to lazy slits, we told him the horrible truth.  Cable was out.  Cable was going to be out for days.  We told him no phone worked in the house.  No computer to bang out URLs on and no television.  Chad told us he was going to be sick and no purple vitamin was going to make him better.

Cable was down for five days at our house.  Chad was on IV life support.  He could barely manage to eat a bowl of his favorite Cheerios.  Even after cable service was restored, cable television never came back to our house Monday through Friday (this was no accident.  This was parental brilliance).  This was a year ago last July.

Immediately after we lost our lifeline to the world, we met with the following as parents:

Chad:  couldn't focus.  Walked around the house aimlessly as if looking for something, anything.  Periodically grabbed a remote and begged it to work its magic.  Lamented (often) that his life had no direction without the television.   Todd (my husband) and I could swear we even saw a single tear cascading down his cheek for months after the tragedy.  He also started hanging out with us in the kitchen, telling us funny stories about his day, building Lego empires and... wait for it... READING!!!!

Remi:  boy was she pissed-off that she was missing "THE BEST EPISODES EVER" of Full House (really?  Todd and I would rather watch paint dry than anything with the Olsen Twins.)  She also blessed us with her daily sermon titled, "Why am I the ONLY child on Earth blah blah blah!"  She also went back to creating massive dollhouses out of old shoe boxes and cartons.  She created a beading extravaganza on our kitchen table that had me wearing 22 bracelets, 16 necklaces and several rings that cut off circulation.  She decided to hang with her brother, sister and her parents and chit-chat about her daily life and she realized that her dad was actually really funny (although not as funny as her mom!)

Eden:  Huh?  Eden was almost four.  Eden is our third child.  Eden never was able to use the remote control.  She didn't have the sheer strength to get it out of Chad's death grip.  She was also never allowed to choose what she wanted to watch.  That was up to her brother and sister.  Poor thing was tortured repeatedly by Power Ranger Megazords or the Olsen Twins.  She was and is always with her parents anyway.  She thinks we're pretty cool and certainly better company than Bob Saget and a bunch of Ninjas!

The Trade-Off.
Todd and I definitely work harder as parents without our televisions on Monday through Friday.  We certainly have moments when this one wants to play Zingo and that one wants us to tape her in a feature film and the other one wants to play NBA basketball in our driveway.  It can really be impossible to make a fort out of pillows, run a tumbling gym on our king size bed and pretend to be Princess Ariel all at once.   Occasionally we can corral everyone into a Danny Terrio style dance-off, an aggressive game of Hide-and-Seek or family dinner with at least two of the recommended food groups represented.  Mission accomplished.

It has taken over a year of strong conviction.  The pull back to the television is like the pull of heroine to a Junkie -- tempting, intense and ever present.  The pure joy of staying TV sober is vibrant interaction with our children, rewarding conversation about their days and a lot of silly laughter.  Sometimes it can be like water torture -- I'm being honest.  Sometimes the mere sight of another Barbie to dress is enough to drive me to channel surf Nickelodeon with my eyes propped open with bamboo shoots.  But I don't.

I would rather pull my back out trying to dance-off Todd and the kids in our kitchen any day than sit in muted silence being numbed by Ashley Olsen and her Full House.  Our house is "Full to the Top!" and we wouldn't have it any other way.