We are in the middle of Turn Off The Screens Week, a program supported by many school boards in Ontario, described by organizers as providing participants and their parents the “opportunity to discuss the impact of inactivity caused by time spent in front of screens.” So, no video games (console or portable), television, movies, computer time, GPS or electronic fish finders…
Fortunately, the weather has picked up here for the week, so we’ve been able to get the kids outdoors. I still have some stubborn snow deposits in my back and side yards, but we’ve had three straight sunny days and I suspect the snow will be gone for good by tomorrow. This evening, we finished BBQing, played football in the yard and everyone put in some serious reading time. Still an hour to go before bed time. Ken had recently put out a call for painted D&D figure photos for the GeekDad Flickr pool, so I thought maybe I’d kill two birds with one stone.
A bit of digging through the basement and I managed to retrieve the box where I’d stashed the D&D figures I painted way back when*. The kids have never seen them, so we spent the hour pulling them out of packaging and they tried to guess what each one was, while I tried (pretty much in vain) to remember what they actually were. Fortunately, they’re young enough, kind-hearted and sufficiently enamored with cool-looking orcs to refrain from calling me a nerd. When we were done and the kids had staged a few epic battles, I snapped some photos (more in the Flickr pool), then wrapped them up, probably for another decade or so. The quality pales beside the pro paint jobs noted in Ken’s post, but hey, I did most of these when I was anywhere from ten to twelve years old, using a toothpick and pins and they’ve been battered about for decades. And we didn’t have the Interwebs back then to provide handy “how to” guides.
Three more days of “Turn Off The Screens Week” remain; who knows what kind of mischief we’ll get into tomorrow? And before someone asks, I try to obey the no-screen rule while the kids are up and about, even though, technically, it doesn’t apply to me. I suggested implementing a similar program at work, but for some reason management wasn’t totally on board with that…
*To the best of my reconstructive skills, “way back when” would be between 1977 and roughly 1981.
