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Tag Archives: TV

CSI: MCS

25 Wednesday Feb 2009

Posted by Jane Bretl in Motherhood

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

big screen, Gilligan's Island, man cave, TV

No investigation needed to uncover a serious case of MCS at my house:

Man Cave Syndrome.

Big D built it; the clones have followed him down into the basement.  The screen is eight feet wide.  The sound system can, literally, blow their socks off, and sometimes it makes their hair blow back just slightly like that off-camera fan that the models use.  The sectional couch is its own small planet with some type of gravitational pull that affects the male bits in a way I can’t detect.

Three years into the man cave era, I can finally turn on the TV in the basement and make a screen light up, sound come on and run a dvd all at once.  Sometimes.  For years the kids would groan if Dad had to leave the house on a weekend evening; that meant they would have to watch me try to make the electronics work, instead of actually watching something on the electronics. For them, the only interesting part of those evenings was the new swear words they might hear me mutter under my breath, or after 15 minutes of pushing every button on every remote maniacally, the juicy words I might say quite loudly.

The cave is just not my scene.

I have no one to blame if I am upstairs with no one to talk to but myself (and no TV I can watch either).  I was the one to voluntarily remove TVs from all the main floor rooms of the house to make us a TV-free family.  It would be great!  We would all gather around after dinner and talk to each other in meaningful conversations!  We would play board games!  No one could beg to watch commercial-laden, mind-numbing television programming if there was no TV to watch, right?  (See previous posts ranting about the effect of TV on children’s little brains and suspend judgement on my sanity now, please).

Of course, the effect was like withholding Captain Crunch from a kid in the ’70’s — now he will buy them each time he goes to the grocery store.  The kids became more and more fascinated with the Mystical TV That Contained Ingredients That Were Not Good For Them.  They started to spend their precious visits to Grandma and Grandpa’s house staring at their TV, even if it wasn’t turned on.

What is my problem?  I had completely unfettered access to the TV as I grew up, and look how well I turned out (right? huh? huh??).  I learned a lot of classical music from Bugs Bunny, and Shakespeare + opera from Gilligan’s Island (“It is to be, or not to be, that is the question that I ask of thee…”).  I became a very knowledgeable shopper from watching The Price Is Right, especially when I am shopping for… a brand new car!!

I know moderation, in all things, is the key.  Faced with the prospect of conversation (and board games) upstairs, it was inevitable that the menfolk in my house would forge their own new frontier in the basement.  Maybe one little TV in the living room, just for me, wouldn’t be so bad…

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Geek IS the new Cool!

21 Wednesday Jan 2009

Posted by Jane Bretl in Motherhood

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Tags

commercialism, geeks, lego robotics, Marybeth Hicks, TV

Kids are awfully jaded these days.  I sense this goes beyond the proverbial “kids these days” motto of each generation — to some new warp speed warping of their little minds.  Maybe jaded is not quite the right word — just worldly beyond their years?

Case in point:  although we strictly limited the amount of TV that our kids could watch when they were young,  the Little One still  grew up too fast.  At three, he announced that “Sesame Street was for babies”.   (????)  We had shielded him from lots of mainstream kids’ TV programming to avoid all the commercialism and the sugary-cereal-seduction and the shows with annoying character traits. (Caillou, for example, was just a whiner.)  We didn’t want him watching many commercials aimed at kids at all, so we mostly watched PBS.  Being a pre-DVR baby, it took more effort.

Of course, it happened anyway.

Looking back, I’m sure our family’s frequent marathons of watching professional sports had something to do with his speedy media maturation.  There’s nothing like a non-stop feed of erectile dysfunction commercials to broaden a kid’s horizon.  But as I think of all four of us snuggled together, cheering on the Packers, I’m not sure what I would have done differently.

Author Marybeth Hicks has a great book, “Bringing Up Geeks:  Genuine, Enthusiastic, Empowered Kids”.  She talks about how the media is really the “other parent” in our kids’ lives, because it has so much influence on how they grow up.  Check out her website in the Links section.

G.E.E.K. is the new Cool — the concept strikes a cord with kids.  Our Lego Robotics team adopted the phrase as their team slogan!

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jane, candid

In 2009, I started this blog to share my sometimes thoughtful, sometimes funny, occasionally irreverent thoughts on motherhood, writing for publication and myriad creatures that got along as cats and dogs.

One day, I felt like stepping away from living out loud for awhile. Eh, life happens.

Fast forward five years -- I'll gloss over the details for now -- save to say that lucky for me an unexpected detour has provided some new material.

So here I am, standing at the corner. I've been here before, wondering which way to go. This time I choose living.

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