A Day With No TV

I came to a harsh reality recently.

My daughter watches too much TV.


I realized this after she broke the TV.

That's right, Caroline took a spray bottle to our TV (which has a DVD and VCR attached, so really, she took out all three at once!)
She must have sprayed it a lot because the stand it's on was soaked. She told us later she was trying to "clean the TV like Mommy" (awww) but Dave thinks she was trying to shoot the characters on TV. Regardless, it doesn't work.

So we brought down our little TV from upstairs and hooked the cable up to it and all is well, despite the fact that remote doesn't work on the little one (don't you hate having to get up to change the volume? Argg.)

But after a few days, I decided the TV was on too much anyway, so I proposed a "No TV Day" Now, this is a little embarrassing, seeing as I'm sure many of you have "no TV days" all the time, but for us it was a stretch, especially in the Winter. I'm afraid to admit that we've even been known to watch a Disney movie on Sunday (and of course, an occasional football game)

So the night before said day, Caroline and I sat down to write a list of things we could do in place of TV or movie watching.

Our list included Play-Doh, board games, baking, coloring, painting our nails and more.
Most mornings, Caroline wakes us up before we're ready to get out of bed. So we turn the TV on for her and sleep an extra half hour. I was nervous that the next morning she would wake us up and want to watch cartoons. But she actually said, "Mom, wake up! Let's play cause it's no TV day!"


We played Caroline's new favorite game: "Restaurant". It's so cute. She's the waitress, cook, and dishwasher all in one! I have wanted to buy Caroline a little kitchen for SO long! But they're really so expensive and I just could never justify it. A couple of weeks ago, Caroline and I went to take some old clothes and shoes to a consignment store and found this play kitchen! It was $15!!!!! I was SO excited! I was more excited than Caroline! It was pouring rain, and I hauled it out to the car and shoved it in! I think we've already gotten our $15 bucks worth of play time out of it!


Thank goodness that day the weather suddenly turned beautiful so we added "play outside" to our No TV list! This picture is a pretty good representation of what playing outside consists of: Sophie runs away, Archie chases Sophie, Caroline chases Archie and everyone gets some good exercise (everyone but Mom of course!)

On No TV Day, our kitchen turned into an Arts-N-Crafts studio! Caroline loves to cut paper with scissors and stickers are still a favorite, so this occupied her for quite a while!

So, all in all, No TV Day was a success and I've decided it will be a more frequent occasion. However, I did discover something about my daughter. Caroline is not very good about entertaining herself. It was very difficult to get any housework done, because she always wanted me to participate in whatever it was she was doing.

Any ideas on how to keep a toddler occupied so you can get stuff done without sitting them down in front of the TV?