A Week of No TV - Reporting Back.

Nick works on ye worlde famous shelves.

Well, we made it! Seven whole days of no TV is now firmly behind us, and I'm feeling a bit accomplished, actually. Here's how it went down:

One Monday night Nick, determined to take advantage of a week's worth of open evenings, came home with a carful of lumber to build shelves in the mudroom. I've been hoping/begging for them since we moved in, so even though it meant saying goodbye to the evenings spent holding hands and conversing deeply by candlelight that I had imagined, I was pretty excited to get this project underway. So we (mostly Nick) spent the following couple of evenings measuring, sawing, drilling and whatnot until we had some mighty fine shelves in the works. I'll try and show you later in the week.

Meanwhile, another project was underway. We've spent most of the summer trying to get our previous home ready to sell, and last week we got to the point where we knew it was just a matter of a few hours and a lot of hard work before we could list the house. So on Thursday night I drove down there and mopped and scrubbed everything in sight while Nick stayed home and painted the shelves, and on Friday night I stayed home with the kids while he went to work on the townhouse. Again, not quite what I thought we'd be doing, but knowing that we had those evenings free and available gave us the extra motivation to get things done. And friends, our house goes on the market this week!

Truth be told, we didn't just work the week away. One night we curled up with books and popsicles, one night we listened to a favorite radio show together (Wait wait... don't tell me!), one night we had a late dinner for just the two of us and some takeout, and one night we played boardgames with family. As busy and tired as we were, we also found time to just talk and be together.

Did we miss the TV? Absolutely! It has just become our go-to activity, and especially beloved on nights when we're tired and just kind of done for the night. Saturday night was maybe the hardest, because we had finished the shelves and finished getting the townhouse ready, and after we had put the kids to bed and eaten our takeout, we were just a little at a loss for what to do before bedtime. Nick started editing some photos, and then I really didn't know what to do with myself. That's when I thought to listen to a Podcast, which was a nice way to be together, while still doing allowing Nick to keep editing, which is what he wanted to do, while I really just wanted to relax.

We talked a bit about our experiences on Sunday night (as we watched the clock tick ever closer to our our hour of freedom) and concluded that it was a good exercise. We learned that we can be incredibly productive people when you take away the distractions, and we confirmed that there are a lot of other things we enjoy doing besides connecting to Netflix every night. However, neither of us really felt any desire or need to start scheduling regular TV-free nights or weeks. A better fit for us would be telling each other "hey, can we spend the night working on project X/reading books/just relaxing and talking?", which I think is what we are going to do. I also liked that disconnecting from the TV made me feel a little more connected to Nick, if that makes sense. Less distractions = more brain power to focus each other.

And while we did indeed make a bee-line for the DVR after the kids were in bed last night (what was happening on Broadchurch?!?), I think we've reminded ourselves that it's not the only way to spend an evening.