Life's Distractions - an exercise of what is truely important

The more I realize how much I want to simplify my life and the life of my family, the more I realize how important the relationships within my family are. I have been much more aware of the distractions in our lives that are causing chaos and distraction even from the relationships within our family. Each evening when hubby gets home from work, we all want to relax and unwind and spend time as a family. Sometimes this is possible, but sometimes it is not. But what I have realized that for our family, even when we relax together, we are choosing the wrong activities for the lifestyle we want to lead. Currently, relaxing for our family means sitting together in front of the TV, even leaving the TV on while we eat dinner! By nine o'clock we all wonder where the time has gone, and why we feel even more stressed out and not relaxed after sitting in front of the TV for two hours. Why is this? I really have no scientific answer. I only have theories.

Theory #1: TV is draining on the brain. While your body is at rest, the shows you are watching are not actually enriching your life in any way. The information is simply filling up space in your brain!
Theory #2: We think we are spending time as a family, but TV has actually completely disconnected us as a family. We sit brainless in front of the TV, and have no meaningful conversations and actually can get annoyed with one another while watching TV. We have young children, and they tend to be very loud when watching TV. Hubby gets angry when he can't hear the TV, even if he doesn't care what he is watching. He is disconnected from the kids, therefore, they become the distraction instead of the other way around. To me, the TV is the distraction from interacting with the kids, but hubby hasn't hit that enlightened milestone yet!

One of my hubby's biggest complaints recently is that he never feels relaxed, even though he comes home from work, sits on the couch and stays there for at least 2 hours. Why? I think we are going about relaxation in the wrong way.

My exercise for this evening is this: I plan to turn the TV off during dinner and have a conversation! (that is the first step in the right direction, and will now become a house rule). But while we are conversing, I am planning on bringing a paper and pen to the table and ask everyone in the house, to come up with at least 5 activities that they would find relaxing to do together as a family. My guess is that TV will not appear on anyone's list. But once I am done with those lists, I plan to compile them all. Then each night after dinner (once it is cleaned up and dishes are put away...again this would be a good family activity), we will leave the TV off and choose one activity to do before we actually turn on the TV! I'm guessing that once we get going in an activity we will all have tons of fun and be relaxed, and never even turn on the TV.

Now, I know that this won't always happen. There will be evenings when there are shows that we are truely interested in watching, and those nights I see no problem with watching the programs, as long as it doesn't go back to being every night of the week, like it is now! So there is my plan of action to combat this particular problem. I hope it works, if not, I may have to come up with some more creative ideas!