No-PC Evenings

My sam­bear is on his way home by way of the gro­cery store. I always look for­ward to the time when he gets home, but in the last week of our “exper­i­ment” evenings have been even nicer. So we’ve decid­ed to con­tin­ue it—after Sam gets home, nei­ther he nor I will be using PCs. We’re tweak­ing it, though—neither will the chil­dren, as we large­ly saw the backs of shad­owkatt and real_pochacco’s heads dur­ing the evenings last week.

Appar­ent­ly some­one thought that I had decreed that we would­n’t be using the PCs in the evening. No, I can’t take cred­it for that one. For one thing, I don’t make decrees about oth­er adults’ behav­ior, and Sam is most cer­tain­ly an adult. He want­ed to try the exper­i­ment, and he asked me to do it with him, and I agreed. And we’ve both been hap­py with the results. We’re already a very TV-light house­hold, and with­out the hum of the PCs, there are far few­er dis­trac­tions from more cre­ative pur­suits or (gasp!) con­ver­sa­tion among fam­i­ly mem­bers. I do, how­ev­er, expect that the old­er kids will be vying for the phone line more now in the evenings, want­i­ng to chat with their friends the old-fash­ioned way.