Your favorite cartoons, your favorite snuggle spots, and your favorite children matching you frame for frame.
Although I'm writing this, and they're not. Instead they're engaged in a different kind of imaginative play, which is great for their executive functions, the management of their highly cognitive processes that includes working memory, reasoning, task flexibility, and problem solving as well as planning and execution. And all the while the TV rolls on.
Maybe your kids don't watch much TV, or any, like ours do every day. That's great. I don't care. Really. Don't judge.
Okay, they do watch a show called Zig and Sharko that is eerily similar to the old Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner Warner Cartoons. And they watch Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse sometimes. Ack. But then they also watch Martha Speaks, Cat in the Hat, Peg + Cat, Arthur and Wild Kratts, all of which are quality PBS educational shows.
The Mama and I grew up on TV and we turned out okay without violent tendencies or melted goo for brains. Sure I've seen the research, but we read to them lots, and they read lots, and we play with them lots, and they play with each other lots, and we all go outside for lots of experiential and physical fun and adventure, including Beatrice going to martial arts (which she loves still). I promise.
Back to Saturday morning. For some of us, Saturday mornings were (and are still) as sacred as reverent self-serving spirituality, a soft space of forgiving nirvana where our minds can meld with animated escapism and storytelling bliss, all without judgment, sometimes learning, sometimes not.
I remember as it it were...today.
And Saturday morning today for us, where old is new again, is where we can now pick and choose what the girls see (and they can and do too) because of our controlling the programming universe with magical devices and broadband portals. In addition to the above examples, there are also Schoolhouse Rock, The Magic School Bus, The Muppets and more. Plus, most of the Disney classics.
But now are the days of synchronized school girls, with Bea in kindergarten everyday and Bryce back in preschool three days per week. This school-bound book-learnin' week-to-week speed of light journey has only just begun, and for the girls (and us, because work doesn't disappear), we'll forever hold on to the weekend mornings as a critical free-range entertainment time.
Because Saturday morning. Sigh.
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