media-free weekends

We have a pretty consistent rule in our house, though "rule" sounds harsh.  It's more of a lifestyle.

The children do not watch TV on the weekends.

A few years ago I announced that we were not going to watch TV on Saturday or Sunday.  Saturday and Sunday were No Show days.  Actually, my children watch very little TV.  They pretty much only watch shows on PBS or they watch DVD's.  Now we have Netflix on the Wii so they watch episodes of kid's programs that we've selected.   So calling the weekend No Show days made more sense.

Here's what we did today, without any TV, computers, or screen media of any kind:

Ate breakfast.
The kids ran off to their rooms and played with each other and several of their gazillion toys that are not the TV.
Then we painted pictures. 
I took out some garbage and noticed that even though it was blustery, it was quite warm.
We played outside.  All morning. 
We cleaned up the Halloween decorations.  We did some other yard projects.  They ran around the front yard.  They ran around the backyard.
They tried to fly a kite.  3-2-1 blastoff is almost as fun as actually getting a kite up in the air.
They played with a ball.  They went down our slide.  They played on the teeter-totter.  They played make-believe.

Then it was time for lunch.  The kids prepared their own pb&j sandwiches.  We never watch TV while fixing or eating meals anyway, so there's that.
After lunch, the kids ran off and played with each other and their toys.  Again.

Then this great thing happened after lunch.
The girls were playing with some stamps I had before I even had kids.  I dragged the box into the house -it had been on a shelf in the garage waiting for the perfect moment to make a debut in the kids' life.  I have flowers, and leaves, and other pretty curlicue types of stamps and all sorts of pretty bright flower colors.

This is while Gabe and Wolfie are burying a treasure box.  Yes!  Gabe decided that he wanted to bury some ale in the ground to age it for two years.  Yes!  He tells Wolfie, "Hey, do you want to bury a treasure that we'll dig up 2 years from now?  We'll have to measure some coordinates to remember where it is."  So Wolfie gets to dig a hole in the ground, one of his favorite past times.

See below:

The rest of the afternoon included games, cards, pretend, some banging on the piano, books, some homework, smooching, wrestling, chasing, pretending to be kittens, playing with more toys, etc. etc. etc.

Dinner, bath, books, bed.

The kids don't know what they're missing by having a media-free day (but honestly, I really don't think they are missing anything).