The kids have been grounded from watching T.V. this week.  They fight over the remote constantly.  My son enjoys the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, while my daughter flips between Disney and the Family Channel. Although their T.V. time is limited, when they do watch they compete for what to watch. Every time there is a commercial or one leaves the room, the channel gets changed. The beginning of the week there was an all out battle over the remote and the remote lost. I don’t know how they did it but they broke it completely in two.  Needless to say I was angry, not just about the remote but the constant fighting. So in addition to replacing the remote, they have been banned from watching any television. You would have thought they had been condemned to bread and water.  They moped around like lost souls and followed me around the house more than usual.  Every suggestion I made for things for them to do was naturally shot down as ‘boring’.  Normally they play outside for hours at a time or have some sort of project they are working on, but for some reason this week, nothing seemed to be interesting enough to keep them occupied. This made even the basics of thinking a challenge for me.   Finally, Wednesday, they began to make discoveries in their rooms.  Out from the recesses of their closets came the long forgotten science kits and the unfinished craft projects. Dust was blown off half read books and finished and amazingly chores were done right the first time. They sat together in the same room without nit picking at each other and all was right with the world.  This went on for the whole day. I should have been suspicious, but I was enjoying the bliss.  While making dinner, I let them onto my computer. You guessed it. They had found a way to watch TV without TV.  I didn’t even think of it.  They were quiet and working together.  When I caught them, they used all the logic of a child with his hands in a cookie jar and tried to argue a legal loophole. They were not watching television. It was the computer.  They weren’t fighting and were on Disney. It didn’t fly with me and now they are banned from the computer.   It is going to be a long weekend. LOL