Plugged In, Sort of

I requested something of Matt a few weeks ago. I wanted the kids to be able to watch the Olympics. He was sure he could rig something up through our computer to make viewing possible. He tried. He even called the cable company to see what they could do, which was nothing, unless we wanted them to come hook us up to cable, which we didn't.
My Mom and Dad came for dinner last Friday. My Dad is able to access his t.v. at home through a computer (a nifty little ability given to him as a gift by my brother--it's saved my Dad's sanity more than once at our house when he was able to watch the big basketball game or golf tournament.) Anyway, Dad accessed his t.v. through our computer so that we could watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. That was pretty neat, but sitting around the small computer screen in a semi-circle of dining room chairs wasn't so neat.
Matt and I decided the easiest, most straight-forward solution to the Olympics watching problem was to deep 6 our current t.v.--the nearly decade old analog monstrosity without a down volume button, which was only a problem when we couldn't find the remote the control. Guess how often that happened in a house full of kids? However, if one could overlook the volume problem, this t.v. did have one very nice feature. It had a permanent display of closed captioning for the hearing impaired (that feature was added 4 or 5 years ago when one of the littles was messing with the t.v. and we were never able to fix it). If you have a sense of humor, closed captioning can actually be quite entertaining, especially when someone in the movie is "humming" or "whistleling."
So Matt and Paul went to Walmart last night after dinner. I got the littles to pick up the family room with promises of snacky Olympic night. The girls and I headed to the kitchen to make caramel corn (sans the usual M & Ms--my green & red Christmas stash is now gone). An hour or so later, we were all sitting in front of our new t.v. watching Bob Costas and the Olympics. We got to see Missy Franklin win her gold medal. Sir Isaac Cuteness clapped at all the right times. Of course, we paid for the late bedtime today with some very bad bunny behavior from the littles (stamp ink all over little hands, flour all over the pantry floor, fighting, kicking, screaming). After not having t.v. for so long, we were surprised at how trashy the commercials have become. Even a seemingly innocent fabric softener commercial turned biblical gender roles on their head and glorified emasculation. That one required an explanation to the kids. We're trying to teach them to always view everything they see, hear and read through the lens of Scripture. We ended up muting and/or turning off the commercials last night.
Our plan is to watch the Olympics as a family in the evenings, then during the day, Matt will disconnect the t.v. antenna. When the Olympics are finished, we'll put away the antenna permanently. Over the last few years, we've realized there's very little we miss on t.v. If there's a true emergency, we've found the internet is sufficient to keep us up to date. Otherwise, the headlines in the newspaper are enough to keep us satisfactorily depressed.
The new t.v. will certainly make for nicer movie viewing. Additionally, I'm pretty sure that the folks in our small group Bible study will also be appreciative of it. They will no longer have to suffer with the closed captioning.