One day without connection

My addictions are many, but the internet is the one that causes me most anxiety. This article by Mark Bittman in the New York Times makes me very happy, although I don't think Jumbo is going to react with wholehearted joy to my suggestion that we celebrate a Secular Sabbath and turn off all electronic devices on Sunday at home. My idea of us all playing a ball game on a windy beach while the dogs scamper around us is a far cry from the reality - it's hard to coerce a 17 year old and a 13 year old into anything let alone force-fed family fun. The closest we come to it is early evening, when we're cooking and the children sit in the kitchen and tell us about their days and argue over whose turn it is to feed the dogs (Briar is usually woofing up a frenzy at this point, wiggling her bum so hard that I fear she'll displace her hip.) Last night N had come home from an airsoft tournament (a dozen adolescent boys running round a large garden in Westwood shooting at each other for three hours) in a smiley mood and M was happy about her new purple jeans with zips on them, and we managed a few minutes of jolly chatting while chopping onions, grating carrots, refilling olive oil bottles for the Spag Bol.

It's probably not a good idea to discuss loudly our crap parenting skills in the kitchen while both children are within earshot. It isn't easy, this stuff. When I told N, look we haven't done this before either, we're trying to do the right thing but we screw up too, he looked utterly bewildered. Again, probably not something you should share with your children. I don't know why I just don't give up on trying to make them tidy their rooms. God knows, my room was hideously untidy all through my teenage years and just because I've found Martha Stewart and Real Simple and Target Storage Containers in cute shades of pale blue, doesn't mean they have or will or even want to.

So it's three in the morning and I've just read the Bittman piece and I've sent J (who's sleeping beside me) an email that says: "This is a VERY interesting piece. Why don't we try it?" Note the BLOCK CAPS for emphasis and the peppy tone. I can just see him rolling his eyes in the morning when he reads it. I'll be all To the Lighthouse on him and suggest a picnic or a walk in the canyon, and he, predictably, will be Leslie Stephen, walking around and muttering, pdf in hand.