Weekly Status: Week #2

An interesting week at the TV-Free household. The following potpourri of thoughts is in no particular order (and may not be particularly interesting...but...).

Subconscious Remote Addiction
For the second time since this experiment started, this week I happily returned home from work, walked through the front door whistling, step over to the television and grabbed the remote, sat down on the couch and clicked it on. Only after the empty blue screen came up did it strike me that I was caught up in some subconscious, trance-like state. I've decided to track the occurrences of this anti-pattern in hopes that this data can be used to attain a government grant (hopefully in the 7-figure range) to study this malady.

Family-Fun Funding
The girls have begun to find that "fun" can sometimes be more pricey (depending on the type). We've enacted what I call the "Dad Subsidy" rules. The rules:

• You need it? Dad Pays.
• You want it? Girls Pay.
• You want it, and dad wants it, too? Dad subsidizes the purchase with matching funds.
• Mom wants it. Dad pays one way or the other.

At any rate, this has brought forth the need for what some people might call the prevailing wage. For basic, short chores around the house, the prevailing wage is the same one my father enacted: A roof. For bigger chores, I now pay $5/hour. Now before the cries of "CHEAP!" go up let me assure you that this $5/hour is tax-free, and by my calculations that comes to somewhere around a $28 per hour if it were a taxable wage... Pretty generous, I think.

Alternate Addictions
The kids computer is busy these days. One might suggest that the girls have replaced one addiction for another. Today, I developed a new strategy to deal with this alternate addiction. Remember those "basic, short chores" that I mentioned above. Well, there's always this discussion about "Whose turn is it?" around here. I have a new indicator that is always accurate as to which daughter should be assigned the chore. She's the one sitting in front of the computer. Cruel, yes...but fair, no?