Where the Heck Have We Been?

I see that my last post was in August. Where the heck have we been these past two weeks you ask? Just here in Chicago, but our neighbor hired someone to cut down a tree in their backyard and the tree cutter managed to also cut our cable line leaving us without Internet for nearly a week. My favorite part of the dozen or so calls to our Internet provider to try to get it fixed was the time when the customer service rep from India tried to convince us that the reason we had no Internet service in Chicago was due to the hurricane that was hitting the U.S. Joe tried to explain that we live in Chicago hundreds of miles from the coast and that we were pretty sure the outage was actually due to the cut cable line that was dangling in our back alley, but the conversation went nowhere. Not a shining moment for outsourcing customer service.

In addition to the Internet being out, the same line also ran our cable, which meant no t.v. for the boys for a week. This little unintentional experiment highlighted for us what boob tube addicts our boys are. They are limited to an hour of t.v. a day that they watch first thing in the morning when they wake up. It is usually an hour of cartoons--the Bernstain Bears for AJ, Thomas the Tank Engine for Davey, Caillou for both. On the weekends they can choose a movie instead of cartoons and have been favoring Pinocchio lately. When the t.v. comes on, they are little zombies. Davey literally stares at the screen with his mouth hanging open, and they both do not respond to questions unless the show is paused or turned off to get their attention. They have both started to laugh out loud at what they find to be the funny parts of shows, and AJ's laugh is a particularly boisterous three year-old's shouting laugh that sounds fake but is actually sincere (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!) It makes me jump almost every time and then laugh to myself. So when they did not get their morning fix, they were cranky and out of sorts, like an adult without coffee. When I explained to AJ that we couldn't watch t.v. because it was broken, he said "Mama, I'm big! I will get out my tools and fix that t.v. so that I can watch my shows again!" He was determined to correct this problem. I am looking forward to the day when he is 16 (or 8) and can actually fix the cable for us.

Here is a picture of my two little couch potatoes in their favorite spot for morning cartoons.