Screen Free Week

Valentine's Day is a special day for our family. Its the day we made official our falling in LOVE with GOD. The children were baptised, I was confirmed, and we all had our first communion. It was glorious!

(I wont go into details of the other member of our family, since this is a positive and fun blog entry!)

In commemoration of our special day, the kids and I have a few plans. Our priest/friend Fr. V advises that we at least go out to eat on our baptismal anniversary. And so we are on the hunt to find a sushi joint that is open on a Monday...and to get to it before the dinner rush. In addition, we will attend a mass, and light our baptismal candles again. Maybe we can make something simple like rice crispie treat hearts and doves.

We will also make another commitment- in a sense a Little Lent. I know this commitment will seem hard at first, but will be filling to our souls very quickly. We are having a screen free week.

Little Brother is actually excited. He has a hard time regulating his own screen time, and I think he feels some relief to have this imposed on him. He has an excuse to invest his energies elsewhere and can be so creative when not lured in by too much easy technology. And we certainly have holed up the last two weeks since a blizzard dumped nearly two feet of snow on us. But things are melting off now and the forecast predicts temperatures in the 50s this coming week!

Little Brother wrote a Valentine poem about our commitment this week:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Screen time is bad,
We're staying green.

*green stands for go.

And so here are our ground rules for screen free week.

•  No TV
• No Jellybean Game (my fav' handheld game)
• No computer
• No Wii
• WAIT! NO WII?!

OK. Lets start over.

How about a 30 minute coupon for each person per day. That seems more moderate. Then we can prioritize how we use our screen time. And I get to blog and check email. Really fast.

Let the celebration begin!