on some off some

i have so many dreams in my mind about how i want to live,

and so many of these ideals can be wrapped up with my favorite phrase of "in the old days....".

i love talking to my grandma about her life as a child...

the slow pace, the simplicity, the value on things that really matter.

while i don't want to completely live without many of the modern advancements of our time,

i often feel that our life is too busy, too loud, and somewhat unfocused.

i enjoy the world we live in,

but sometimes i feel like there are so many things (many things good, and many things not good) to sort through.

i am spending too much time sorting through "things" that some days go by feeling unlived,

almost wasted.

i am a maximizer,

so it really bothers me when a day goes by that feels wasted on things that don't really matter or that doesn't point my family in the directions we want to be heading.

in an attempt to cut out the extra noise in our lives i have been forced to address my family's screen time habits.

screen time: any time spent in front of a screen of a computer, tv, video game, etc.

i have always been a tv nazi,

limiting the type and amount of tv that we watch.

i have struggled finding a system that works for my family.

i just couldn't the stand the feel of the tv on everyday.

it seemed like all sam & will would do is wait for their beloved screen time.

they were too distracted with the waiting that they couldn't do anything else.

i can assure you this was NOT the way i wanted to teach my children.

i stumbled upon this article from love and logic awhile ago. (full article posted below)

this paragraph really stood out to me:

"At Love and Logic, we believe that children learn to make good decisions about big and important matters by making plenty of poor decisions about small matters, and experiencing empathy and logical consequences from the adults in their lives. As a result, we believe that wise parents allow their children to make plenty of affordable mistakes.

Watching sex and violence on television is not an "affordable mistake."

while i don't let my kids watch sex and violence on tv,

i felt inside of me that allowing my children to become so dependent upon media at such a young age i was pointing them in a direction that would make these battles harder later.

i knew something had to change.

we decided to do on days and off days.

every other day they can each choose a pre-authorized show and 1 extra screen time (pbs kids computer time or star wars wii).

i was really nervous about how this would go.

i was afraid there would be an even bigger battle than what i was already fighting.

i was prepared to fight it though.

what has transpired over the past few weeks has been most unexpected and more welcomed than i ever could have imagined!

there has not been resistance.

it has felt quite the opposite.

i have gotten the sense many times that my boys are almost thanking me for reducing the noise in their lives.

thanking me for allowing them to be more like kids in "the old days" doing simpler things that kids should be doing...

building pillow forts, playing hide and seek, rolling huge snow balls across the yard, playing with their brother, hot wheels, books, legos, talking, working, and slowing down.

it is with gratitude that i say our house feels a little more like "the old days" now.

am i writing this post because i think i'm a perfect mother doing everything right?

absolutely not,

far from it.

i'm writing it as a reminder to myself that i am the mother.

i am responsible for training my children's healthy habits now,

whether that be about how to spend their time, how to clean their room, or how to treat other people.

i am so far from perfect,

and i make many mistakes in my parenting and in my personal life.

however, i just hope to avoid making the "unaffordable" kind of mistakes.

and i always want to remember that i am a mother with a job to do,

and i hope desperately that i get it right.

the love and logic article that i read:

Mom and Dad watched as their one-year-old son crawled around the floor of Marv Mozzarella's House of Fun. They noticed that little Carlton had found some tasty lead paint chips on the floor. Ma and Pa really wanted to do something. The chips were bad for their boy, but the other parents were letting their kids eat them. Could something so widespread and readily available really be that bad?

While most parents aren't sitting around letting their kids eat lead paint, too many of them let poison ooze into their homes via their television sets. This toxic waste, represented by explicit violence and sexual images, is being beamed into millions of homes via satellite and cable.

Just like poison, these images may not cause immediate death, however, the toxic effects do accumulate and cause certain harm to body, mind, and spirit. Study after study has shown the horrific effects of exposure to sex and violence: Kids become desensitized, lose their ability to experience empathy, and fail to develop healthy cause-effect thinking.

At Love and Logic, we believe that children learn to make good decisions about big and important matters by making plenty of poor decisions about small matters, and experiencing empathy and logical consequences from the adults in their lives. As a result, we believe that wise parents allow their children to make plenty of affordable mistakes.

Watching sex and violence on television is not an "affordable mistake."

Watching explicit trash on MTV is akin to dumpster diving.

As adults, we can remember that we have control over whether we make it easy for children to ingest poison within our homes. Smart folks don't leave pesticides within reach of their toddlers. Smart folks also call their cable or satellite providers and cancel the programming that brings sex and violence into their homes. Others decide to password protect the explicit channels.

Best of all, the wisest parents engage in plenty of loving conversations with their youngsters about the fact that the human mind resembles a computer: Garbage in, garbage out.