Just this last weekend, I moved into a trailer house. That’s right, I’m a homeowner now! It’s very exciting, but with the added financial responsibility comes a greater desire to make sure that I’m keeping on budget as much as I possibly can. One of the things that was sacrificed in my quest for financial freedom was our cable TV. My media reviews co-author, Jaime Egan, suggested that I write a blog series about our little adventure in No-TV Land.
At first, living without cable seemed very doable. We have a DVD and VCR, and a whole closet full of movies, so we didn’t think it would be a problem at all. But then we hit a roadblock – the TV fell off the moving truck as it was being unloaded. With a Wal-mart nearby, that was soon solved.
But then both our DVD and VCR went missing. We loaded them up at the old house and they have not yet surfaced over here. Keep in mind, we have four children, one being a 22-month-old, and it was tantamount to a catastrophe, especially at night while I was trying to unpack and it was too dark to tell the kids to go outside to play. The baby spent about three hours screaming his head off on Sunday night, bored out of his little mind, with his toys still packed and his mommy getting grumpier by the minute. It was a state of emergency.
As a Mormon, I believe in keeping the Sabbath day holy, and part of that means that I don’t go to the store unless absolutely necessary. You can, however, bet your boots that at 12:01 a.m. I was getting in the car and driving to Wal-mart. (It was technically Monday!) I exchanged the new TV (still in the box) for one with a built-in DVD and VCR. It was more expensive than I wanted, but it was an emergency.
Things have been a bit calmer since then. The children’s rooms are unpacked and they are playing with their toys, playing on the outside playground, and watching movies while I finish the rest of the house. They haven’t complained at all about not having their regular channels.
And as for me – for the most part, I’ve been too busy to even think about television, except for a few minutes last Tuesday night when I realized that I was missing Dancing with the Stars. Sigh. This may be harder on Mommy than it is on the kids.