A Battle Victorious

There, posted the lost post of last week. Now on to this week. Which includes another birthday, sob, and vestry and everything. And a gray sky, forecast for the whole week.

But rather than rambling on about any of that, I thought I’d triumph, publicly, over some small ground I’ve won, as a parent, in the last few months. Like so many in this capacious American landscape, we play a losing game on the field of electronic everything–iPods, Xbox, Netflix, that guy on YouTube who does those minecraft videos. When Romulus isn’t playing minecraft and watching that guy, he’s making minecraft stuff out of paper. When Elphine is “reading a book” I’m frequently removing her iPod from her deft fingers. While Alouicious is living and breathing, he is always measuring and counting every speck of electronic minute that he feels is coming to him. The little girls are obsessed with “watching movies” which is a nicer way of saying they partake, whenever they can, of the ghastly provender on the kids side of Netflix. My Little Pony, Strawberry Shortcake, Curious “Punkin” George.

“Why,” an intelligent person might inquire, “do you let them watch, consume, partake, rot their tiny minds, with all that stuff? Just,” you might say, ” turn it off.” Ah yes. We should. We probably shouldn’t ever have turned it on in the first place. Like Steve Jobs, we should have been more savvy. We should have lived quiet, settled, unplugged in lives, feeding on the word of God, and not the sewage of the world. Ok, so we failed, big. And not just with the children. I’m typing this on my tiny iPad keyboard, I just listened to the bible on my phone, I don’t own a camera, I just take phone pictures, I LOVE technology, enough to read tech blogs for fun…so, um, it’s something we, even in sin and sorrow, are managing, rather than living without it.

So here is my small triumph.

I reclaimed some of the ground.

Ta Da. That’s it. Well, it was not that easy. It took a lot of cajoling and weeping and gnashing of teeth. But, through persistence and a constant gentle freaking out, I have won a serious and worthy fight. My methods were simple. First, for months, I prayed. I begged God to help me take a whole Xbox morning away. I felt, perhaps irrationally, that the children playing Xbox minecraft Friday Night, Saturday Morning, Sunday Afternoon and Monday Morning was excessive. Sunday can’t be done away with because children come home with us from church expressly and only to play on our beautiful TV. They have a few hours to wait for youth group so they play minecraft, take breaks to climb trees and are then fed Sunday pork while Matt and I huddle in the kitchen, sheltering ourselves from the noise and chaos. It’s perhaps not what Steve Jobs would do, but probably what Jesus would. Oh, and we pour out buckets of soda, and cookies, and occassionally chips. So Sunday wasn’t an option. Neither was Friday. It’s just for the duration of our short “date”. Matt and I eat a chop, some peas, drink a bottle of wine, talk wildly about the week and then collapse into bed. The children eat corndogs and consume the technology of their choice. Which left Saturday and Monday.

After prayer and supplication I laid it out. “Children”, I said, “I want you to give up an Xbox day. Either Saturday or Monday, which would you like it to be?” They stared at me in dumb horror. One of the little ones began to weep softly. Aloucious launched a full throated attack. He argued steadily, shrewdly, patiently. But I held my ground. “You all think about it,” I said, “and let me know. I have a nice book for you to listen to on which ever day you decide.”

They finally weighed in with giving up Monday. So I plugged in the CD player the night before, laid out the CDs, and for seven Monday mornings they listened to the Chronicles of Narnia. One book a Monday. Late late late on the night before the eighth Monday, I heard Alouicious and Elphine whispering, “Narnia is over, isn’t that great, so we can play Xbox tomorrow.” Horrified I climbed into bed and while Matt slept soundly, I spent another three hours figuring out how to download audio books from the library and how to use the app and how to get them from my device onto Elphine’s. At dawn a smug child appeared next to my head and said, “we finished Narnia last week, so we can play Xbox, right?”

I laughed happily in an early morning stupor. “Oh no,” I said, “I remembered, I have a book downloaded on Elphine’s iPod for you to listen to.” They crumbled onto the floor in sorrow and finally drug themselves downstairs to listen to How to Train a Dragon.

#winning