TV free no more

My 6 year old's favorite part of church is helping the librarians. The ward librarian is an experienced mom of spirited kids who is wonderfully understanding about my son's need to be busy busy busy all the time. So every week she has a job for him to do before sacrament meeting starts (like folding programs or dusting or straightening shelves) and a little gift for him -- a notepad and pencil, a mini puzzle, just something she has picked up at the $1 store. Needless to say I LURVE her. She is just awesome. She has made my kids want to go to church.

Well today while we were drilling the last touches of "Praise to the Man," they were in there helping. 6 year old picked up the bunny ears for one of the television sets and was playing with them. The librarian told him he could have them, because obviously we don't really use them on the TVs at church -- they are hooked to VCRs for showing Church productions and conference talks when you are unprepared to teach your class. Which is what I did today, so please don't imagine that I'm knocking it.

Anyway, so then he had these telescoping bunny ears during sacrament meeting. Thank heaven we sit in the back of the chapel because it would have been pretty distracting otherwise. They were pretty fun to play with. At some point he asked what they were for. And like an idiot, I told him. And then of course, when we came home we hooked them up to show him how it works.

So now we have broadcast television in our home, something we had expressly decided we didn't want because of lack of control. You can be watching a perfectly innocent basketball game, and all of a sudden there's the bikini team advertising Bud Light, or Paris Hilton's soft porn for Carl's Jr., or something like that, degrading and immodest and antithetical to what I want to teach my kids.

I can't pretend I don't sometimes want to watch TV. I mean, come on. When you have six loads of laundry piled up on the couch it is pretty depressing to think about either running out for a video, watching one of our tired library titles over again, or folding in silence. I used to fold while I listened to This American Life online. But I kind of soured on that after a few nasty references to Mormons.

I think the bunny ears will disappear when the kidlets go to sleep tonight, to come out only when they are asleep, and maybe on Saturday mornings for cartoons -- we'll see. We'll see if we can be moderate. Really we have been TV free not because we are so disciplined, but because we are just the opposite. When we have TV it gets out of control. It's easier to go cold turkey for us. I hope we're not making a big mistake.