Yes it was one of those frustrated filled, red face, hair pulling out tantrums which ended up with "ALL LAPTOPS, IPODS HERE NOW"
(no chance of a please in that teeth clenched sentence).
After a week of kids fighting, the boy regularly asking to go on minecraft, router playing up, countless updating and backing up needed to be done by me..... yesterday Itunes crashed AGAIN. All I wanted to do was load an audiobook onto Mollies ipod but no it wouldn't work.
After 1 hour of trying and failing with tension mounting I exploded!
There was silence in the house, no one was game to speak, everyone quietly gathered up their equipment and put it in the computer room cupboard, we all looked at each and we felt a collective weight lifted from us....we felt total FREEDOM!!!
No hint of an exaggeration, within 5 minutes, the kids were outside on their bikes. By the end of the day the kids had enjoyed drawing, puzzles, more bike riding, played badminton, helped with dinner, helped with household chores...ALL without one fight, whinge, moan.
Today the kids wanted to get up early to have a tennis practice and now are back on their bikes playing their timed lap game around the house.
If you asked me last week if we were a technology lead family I would have answered a definite NO. I didn't think it consumed our lives, we had usage rules but somehow those rules became hazy and what ended up happening was, we were addicted...minecraft, movie making, facebook, emailing, forums, shopping, checking stuff. I admit, there was learning involved ie new skills, researching, homeschooling stuff but goodness, what happened to going to the library!!
It is naive to think that the equipment will stay in the cupboard for ever but I have given us this week off. Television at night is fine, I will need a little computer time for emailing, blogging, bill paying but once that is done, it goes off.
Together as a family we will slowly introduce it back into our lives but for now FREEDOM!!
It has been a real learning experience for the kids as well as me. Until I removed it, we just didn't realise how addicted we were.
To be honest, I have done this before so the transition into a technology free life was easy for the kids, they knew what to do but the first time was totally different. There was a detoxing period and it got ugly!!
Boredom, anger, whinging but after a couple days we moved through it. It was definitely worth it!
I wanted to share this just in case it rings true to another family. We have our kids for such a small amount of time, lets turn the technology off and enjoyed them!
Oh timer has gone off....I have a banana cake and jam drops in the oven, a gorgeous pink quilt to finished for my niece and the floor to clean
Back to real life and loving it!!
