40 Days... perhaps longer???

Today starts the season of Lent- the 40 days before Easter. While we are not Catholic, my husband and I have been in the practice of "giving up" something for Lent. We haven't done it every year, but in the past we have sacrificed hot drinks (tea for me, coffee for him), eating out (well, at least paying for eating out- we let other people pay for us!), and ice cream... the hardest sacrifice to date. But this year, Daddy has come up with the most extreme challenge yet. For Lent this year, we are giving up TV!

Our rules are simple: NO TV. No taping of regularly scheduled shows, no news programs, no tv. Movies are an exception- we like to watch Veggie Tales movies as a family. But watching a movie is a deliberate act, with the content and the timing determined by the viewer... whereas watching tv tends to be a vacuous pasttime, controlling the viewer's schedule, sucking the viewer in to hours of mindless dribble, and generally containing little to no redemptive qualities.

Now certainly adding a cable feature like dvr would eliminate the control tv has over our schedule... but instead of upgrading, I canceled our cable. Well, downgraded at least. I assume that after the 40 days of Lent we will resume some tv watching- at least the news- and the disconnect and reconnect fees would be more than paying the $18 for the basic cable during Lent. If I'm wrong, and we decide to forgo tv forever and ever, it's only cost me $18.

What will we do with all the time redeemed from our "regularly scheduled programming"? Bond as a family, prepare for our new baby, invest time in our marriage... but probably not vacuum the basement rafters or wash the kitchen cupboards- 2 chores I have an unnatural compulsion (called nesting) to complete before Lydia arrives.