The Technology Problem

I've been here 16 days, which makes this the first day of my third week of work, and already I can see the issue that will create a gap between me and my host "mom": television. I love that my family doesn't watch a lot of tv. I had too much of it as a kid, adolescent and college student. You don't need tv every day. Especially when you're a kid and it's summer. But sometimes your kids slept 7 hours (as opposed to their regular 10.5) last night and then went to school and then played for several hours in the hot sun and now they are exhausted and need to wind down. When you have trained your children that this is when they can watch tv, and then leave them with me, they may end up watching tv in these moment like you trained them to do.

I've been with the boys 9 days, doing at least part of those days on my own, alone with them. Twice I have allowed them to watch tv. Once the kid I had with me was sick, and once today, it was to be a break after eating lunch before we went to pick his brother up from school. 2/9 for a new person in the household is not so bad in my opinion. Especially when you consider that their mom has set them in front of the tv three additional times when I had nothing to do with it. I'm not relying on tv, I'm using it at the right time as a tool. She said no tv on school days, I denied them tv 3 days in a row because it was a school day. She said no tv right before bed, I denied them tv twice because it was already 6:30 and they needed to be in bed by 7:30. I am not relying on tv. But Tina seems to think that I am.

And that's the issue right. You ask me what we did today:

7:10 - Breakfast
7:30 - Papa leaves for work
7:45 - Get dressed, prep things for the day
8:00 - Read a book aloud while the boys play legos and cars
8:30 - Grab stuff and leave for Kindergarten
9:10 - Get back from Kindergarten drop and have a 2.5 hour play date (playing with cars, scooters and sand box) with the neighbors (now 3 kids under 4) which I supervised alone
11:40 - Start making lunch while the kido does a dinosaur art project
12:05 - Eat lunch
12:25 - Choose a movie* and start watching while I clean the kitchen and the rest of the house
           12:50 - I sit down and start watching the movie with him
12:45 - Oma calls and says she wants to take both boys to the See for swimming
1:35 - Movie is over and Oma arrives to pick up the boys

(count it-the movie lasted for 1 hour and 10 minutes of the 7 hours we were together and the 12 hours I was supposed to have them today)

Ask the kids what we did today: we watched a movie with Dinosaurs.

I had a great day with the boys today. They were happy, a little tired after lunch but they don't nap, and very pleasant and well behaved. So yes, I'm sorry, we watched a movie. It's the same length as the two tv shows Tina suggests are better for them to watch. I'm not encouraging tv, or using it as a crutch or anything. I'm stimulating their imaginations and playing with them and not just sitting them in front of the tv. I hope she'll learn to see this in the next month or so. It seems right now like she's expressing her own discomfort at how much tv they normally watch by criticizing me for letting them watch tv at the same or lesser frequency. But that is the burden of the first Au Pair I suppose. To wait out the onset of aware and intentional parenting.

*By the way the movie we watched was Ice Age 3 and we watched it in English and he was laughing at verbal jokes, so... feeling okay about that choice.