No Screen For a Day Experiment-- Our Results

Well, we did it! We easily made it through an entire eight hour day without screens.  When I first posted about our challenge (here), I wasn't sure how easy it would be, and while I can't say we breezed right through it, it really didn't seem like much of a challenge.

Certainly no one felt suicidal, sick, or edgy without them.

That said, I was surprised to notice how often I did think about using technology and screens throughout the course of the day!

Evan is my early riser and since I'm pretty much the only other one who wakes up early we have gotten into a routine where he watches videos and I get my stuff done around the house or work on my blog.  

Since I could not work on my blog, I settled at the table to work on other things.  Evan, however, had no idea what to do with himself and spent the first half hour or so of our day talking my ear off.  I had no idea how important that first  quiet hour of the day was for me.  Evan's non- stop talking was driving me NUTS!  

At least three times I had to stop myself from telling him to go watch something!   

Once I set my stuff aside and focused on him our morning went much better; so much better that we all talked about doing away with screens in the morning every morning!

By 7 am Evan was completely done all of his schoolwork for the day and since his older brothers were just waking up and settling around the table to eat and work on their schoolwork he decided to do EXTRA work.  On his own!!  And writing work at that! 

By the time we left for karate class everyone was just about done their individual schoolwork and we had had such an easy morning of everyone getting themselves all ready without any reminders or nagging from me.  It was so nice. 

Though I did come pretty close to pulling out the laptop to look up the definition of a word to help the older boys with their work before remembering that screens were off limits and we'd need to use the dictionary.  

After karate we ran a few errands, came home for lunch and finished up our group work.  

Once our schoolwork was completely done the boys all decided to play a board game.  I had warned the boys yesterday that while I would play a game with them I would not play game after game after game keeping them occupied.  

They took me at my word and we spent a good hour playing, laughing, and groaning over our Sorry! game.  

The boys all looked at the clock and calculated they had 30 minutes left of the 8 hour no screen day. 

Alec curled up on the couch and read a book.

I curled up on our love seat to read my book.

The other two boys started playing toys together that quickly turned to rough housing and then Alec joined in and it just got louder and louder.... and I could tell that they were not going to settle down for anything else since they kept stopping to watch the clock and calculating how much longer they had to wait.

I suggested a walk up to get the mail.  It's a good 20 minutes round trip even if the boys decide to ride bikes (which two of them did).  

We arrived home and they lamented the fact that it was 8 minutes past the 8 hour mark and they could have been playing screens for 8 whole minutes already if I hadn't made them get fresh air and exercise!

Yeah, I'm a real monster that way.   

I think we'll probably have a few more of these days but I will admit that I don't think the boys will be the one suggesting it next time.  

It was nice to unplug and focus on "real" tasks for the day. 

I loved knowing that I had to focus on other tasks today; those tasks that I often bypass for my own computer time.  Those tasks that I wish I had the motivation to work on during regular days...  it was so nice to get most of them done today and I enjoyed basking in that feeling of accomplishment.