Yes, I know it’s Sunday, but one of the great family traditions that we love to keep alive and can be a great deal of fun for our family is the tradition of the Saturday morning cartoons. When we were growing up, getting up early on Saturday morning meant bouncing out into the living room wearing pajamas and curling up on the sofa or on a pillow on the floor and turning on the cartoon networks or network television and watching what cartoons are on to see.
Saturday Mornings & Family Time
While there are a lot of objections to watching television as a form of entertainment because kids watch too much television, but Saturday morning cartoon time is different. How is it different? It’s different because it’s time for parents to come out, start the coffee and settle down on the sofa where they can cuddle with the kids or just hang out with them.
Around here, we make breakfast as well – some days it’s pancakes, other days it’s fried potatoes and eggs and on still others, we vote in cereal as our breakfast of choice. We curl up together, we eat our breakfast and we spend the first hour or two of the day as a family just lounging together. Often times during any commercials we’ll talk about what we need to do or want to do for the day.
For our daughter, this is a fantastic opportunity to make plans. She gets to make suggestions and have them heard. Sometimes, she even comes up with comprehensive arguments for why she wants to do what she wants to do. It can be utterly charming to hear her convince her father or me to take her to the park or perhaps to go to the bookstore as our plan for the day.
Fun By Degrees
While Saturday morning cartoons are just an hour or two of quiet family time together, it can be a great way to start off the day without the rush and hustle that we engage in all week long. Our Saturdays are often comprised of housework, yard work, errands and gymnastic classes or otherwise. 9 a.m. Saturday, my daughter does gymnastics – when we get home – we do other things together – but those first couple of hours are devoted to just the three of us enjoying the morning together.
What do you do on Saturday mornings?