a peek inside the fishbowl

… the link to the post you’re looking about kids and chores can be found here.

p.s. Fishbowl readers, the Toronto Star piece by Andrea Gordon is here.

Confused? I hope not. :)

I might as well start out by saying I wasn’t crazy about the activity we drew last week.

Encourage your family to be physically active even when watching TV; do some fun aerobics. Only 10% of Canadian youth are meeting the guideline for screen time of <2 hours per day.

I find this stat a little shocking, don’t you? How do these families find the time to watch TV or sit in front of a gaming console? If they’re watching TV, what are they missing out on?

The girls watch very little TV during the work/school week. Same goes for the Wii, the computer(s) or the iPhone or iPod Touch (which the girls are allowed to use). We’re just too busy.

Comparatively, they do watch a lot of TV on Saturday mornings; from the time they wake up (which is 7:00ish) until about 10:00 a.m. (Which is about how long it takes for Mark and I to get up and make coffee.)

We spend one day per weekend at Mark’s parents, and THAT’S when they cram in a week’s worth of screen time. During our six months of winter, we’re all playing on the laptop or the Wii/Wii Fit for most of the afternoon. When it’s warm, however, we’re out by the pool. (Thank goodness for that.)

Anyway, getting back to this week’s challenge, I didn’t think I needed to make them leap up and do jumping jacks during their three hours of Saturday morning television watching – mostly because we’re almost always doing something more active Saturday afternoon.

If anyone is squeezing in some fitness during TV-time, it’s me. I drop and do 20, spend two minutes doing jumping jacks and/or lunges while heating up the milk for my morning coffee, draw circles with my legs while brushing my teeth every night (it’s harder than you think), and do crunches before I go to bed.

Perhaps if the girls watched more television – or were younger – I’d make them do it. But I didn’t.

The girls have been biking and skating with their friends all around the neighborhood almost every day. We’ve been going out for a walk every night after dinner. Sunday we went to our local park and participated in the annual Spring cleanup event.  We’ve been busy.

So that’s been our week!

I’m going to start drawing the tips for the coming week at the same time I post about the previous week’s activities. I think it’ll be more interesting that way. And if a couple of people do it with me i’ll consider it a bonus.

This coming week I am cheating and picking my family’s activity without the help of the tip jar. And here it is:

Participate in a TV Turnoff Challenge: Screens Free Week is April 19-25
Screen time typically increases as a child ages… and activity time decreases.

This is going to be a challenge for sure, especially for me and Mark. This means: no TV or movies, no Wii or X-box (which belongs to Mark), and no games on the iPhone. No computer games (for the girls) or random Internet surfing (for me).

What will we do instead? If the weather’s good: go outside. We’ll read more. Play games. Maybe go explore a  new park if the weather is good. 

I’ll let you know how we did next Monday.

What about you? How much TV does your family consume during a regular week? And would you consider joining us and tuning out for awhile?

–

Longtime readers might remember our experiment with messages in bottles.

To summarize: we filled two plastic bottles with two messages and dropped them in the Ottawa River. One of which was actually found. In hindsight we should have known that the Island Park bridge – although pretty – was not the best place to do this because the river gets strained of debris at Domtar in Gatineau. It was a neat experiment, even despite the short distance our bottle had travelled.

Anyway, I might get flack for this (someone had taken issue with our polluting the river with plastic bottles) but I wanted to post about a new message-delivery system we tried out yesterday … tying messages to balloons.

We had extra balloons floating around from Sarah’s birthday party last week (YES, that is how long they’ve lasted) and instead of having them die a slow death we decided to do a little experiment.

The girls each wrote a short message (which included our family email address) and put them in lightweight sandwich bags which we stapled it to a shortened string. And then we got ready to let them go.

We went outside and bid a fond farewell.

Here’s where we learned a useful lesson about wind. It can snatch your balloon and send it drifting into the waiting arms of the nearest tree.

And guess what, it’s still there!

We are hoping that someday the tree will release the message.

Sarah went inside and wrote another one, tied it up, and sent it flying. Happily it seemed to clear the neighborhood trees. (Although it looked iffy for a few moments.) Phew.

Both balloons were heading eastward. So if you’re in West Wellington or Hintonburg (or maybe as far as Gatineau again!), please drop us a line if you find them. :)