Musings on TV

My daughter, like any other five year old, loves to watch the tube. We try to limit her access to it as much as possible - we (and she) don't watch commercials, even on DVD's. I admit we just may have used it as a parental time-out on occasion - our code is "employ entertainment device?". Terrible, just terrible, but I swear it's just for emergencies.

Aside from that, we do have cable, but she watches very little - Reading Rainbow and the occasional Barney (shudder), and the Englishman and I just tune in for our reality TV obsessions and Lost even though Lost irks us to no end, but we can't seem to stop ourselves from watching it. We are enjoying our new subscription to Netflix. We rarely go to the movies even though we both work in the film industry, so catching up on films we've missed has been fun. Date night for us is often a movie and take-out on the couch.

It's a rainy day today. Sweetpea and I made French toast and stayed in our jammies til mid-morning while she watched My Neighbor Totoro (which is pure magic) and I considered throwing my computer in the street. She commented recently that Miyazaki is a fabulous filmmaker although she doesn't know who he is. Really, she said that.

She has obviously been listening to our occasional diatribes about killing brain cells by watching too much television, as I just heard this from the other room:

"I think I'll stand up for a little while, 'cause otherwise I'll turn in to a couch potato."

Time to be an engaged mother again.