On Change

A little over a week ago, when TV went exclusively digital, we lost the ability to watch television. No more Arthur and Cyber Chase on PBS, no more news at ten, no more Sunday baseball on Fox or Friends reruns or...what exactly did we used to watch? That's right, for over a week we've been devoid of the great American pastime of lounging on the couch and watching advertisements for cars made by failing companies, prescription drugs for illnesses I'm not always sure exist, and online services that promise to find you a compatible mate/reliable vehicle/dream home, interrupted occasionally by shows with inane, obscene, irrelevant, or nonsensical plot lines. And I feel fine.

I find that we're reading more books, playing more family games, listening to more baseball on the radio (infinitely better than on TV, by the way), and getting to bed at a decent hour more often. I'm also watching my Red Green Show DVD set and a bunch of movies that have gathered dust. We get to our Netflix movies sooner and just seem happier. I don't believe we'll live TV-free forever, but, for the foreseeable future, it's a nice way to live.

But surely that's not all the change we can muster? Okay, here's this. For a few days now we've been measuring beds, walls, and dressers to consider ways we might rearrange the kids' bedrooms to address some concerns we've had of late. While discussing our options yesterday, we came upon a solution we hadn't considered.

Within minutes the plan in motion. We would move to Allyson's room, Allyson would move to our room with Isaac and Ryan, leaving Evan with his own room, which would double as a playroom when he's not napping. It became a messy business (the bunk beds had to be disassembled, and Allyson had a lot more stuff than we expected), and we had to move some of the living room around to accommodate the computer, but in the end we got it done.

Here's what we like. Evan can take a decent nap and get to sleep at a decent hour without the boys going nuts. Allyson and her brothers are playing together well. Summer and I have had to downscale the contents of our closet and find ourselves in a cozy little room.

We still need to finish off the closet situation--the boys' clothes are still in Evan's closet, and we need to move a bunch of our stuff there. The bathrooms need to be swapped out. The door on our room is a bit picky, and the windows all need to be recaulked. And this clearly won't be a long-term situation, but for a few weeks/months/years, this seems a good arrangement. A nice change, as it were.