What we're watching

For not being a tv watcher I'm watching more tv right now than I have for most of our married life.  Part of it because Russ & I have a few shows that we watch together for "dates" and part because it turns out I'm a lot happier about making dinner when I'm entertained while doing it!  I thought it would be interesting to preserve this moment in time...I'm sure in a decade we'll laugh to think about what we watched.

With the kids:

One of my friends had mentioned a few years ago that she was watching Parenthood while exercising.  I had been curious about it before because I noticed that the actress from Gilmore Girls was in it. (Gilmore Girls will forever be the backdrop of 2006 because I watched all however many seasons  while I did all of that sewing the year Cindy Lynn got married.)  So one day I pulled up the pilot episode of Parenthood as I started cooking dinner.

(One of the great things about our house is that the cooktop is on the island and faces towards the tv, which makes it easy to watch something & work.)  

I enjoyed the show enough to keep watching, but what was funny was the pretty quickly Jared and then Rachel started watching it with me.  This made things more complicated since during wrestling Jared was gone M-Th until 5 and on Monday and Thursdays Rachel left for colorguard at 4:30.  This made it so that there were only a few times a week that we could watch an episode together, and neither of them wanted me watching without them.

We're almost to the end of the show now--I think we have 4-5 more episodes.  I've laughed with Russ that EVERYTHING happens to this family, and it appears that will continue to be true right down to the end.  The thing that I love about Parenthood is the depiction of the family.  I joke that it's clear that these people aren't Mormon, because they wouldn't have so much time to hang out together if they were.  But I love the idea of a family that functions like this--that picnicking in the yard under twinkle lights, siblings meeting up at the diner for breakfast, being there for each other in hard times and good ones too, arguing and apologizing.  I love the love that I see in this fictitious family.

One day something happened to Jenna and so I had to take her to the doctor at Intel.  We had to wait quite a while and the tv in the lobby was playing this show called Love it or List it.  There were only 15 minutes left in the show when they called her in to see the doctor and we both were crazy curious to know what happened in the end.  I searched and searched and searched and searched, and finally managed to find which episode we'd been watching, and eventually found that I could pay to watch it on Amazon.  Which I promptly did--it was totally worth it to find out what had happened!

In the process of my searching I had seen that there were some episodes of Love it or List it on Netflix, so this became our backup dinner prep show.  If one of the kids was gone and we couldn't watch Parenthood, we'd watch an episode of Love it or List it.  We've watched enough episodes now that we know what a decent remodel budget is and when people are asking for more improvements than their money will buy.  We know that there will always be some major house problem and that it's very likely that one of the spouses will be negative about everything.  And we know that houses cost a TON in Toronto, even more than where we live.

(Apparently they started filming Love it or Leave it in North Carolina last fall--we can't wait to see those!)

 

With Russ:

You know how there are those moments when someone shows that they really know who you are?  Downton Abbey has been one of those moments for me.  Several years ago Russ came in and said that he had a show he thought I would enjoy watching.  He pulled it up and we were fans from the get-go.  Sometimes we've rolled our eyes at the melodrama of it all, and some of the storylines we haven't enjoyed, but we've always enjoyed this peek back in time at a very different life.  For a while Josh watched it with us and always said something about how he liked it more than he expected to, which is a ringing endorsement from him! It's been a fun Sunday or Monday date night for several years now. We were so sad to hear the recent announcement that next season will be their last.  

I'm not sure when Russ started watching the Amazing Race, but several years ago I started watching it with him and it became our Sunday date night.  Now we both love watching the teams fly all over the world doing crazy tasks to try to win a million dollars.  Frequently I apologize to him that we can never be on the Amazing Race, but I know that doing *anything* without enough sleep and food is a recipe for disaster in my body.  Instead we'll have a great time watching.

True confession.  When I first heard about Survivor I thought it was evil.  It seemed to me that the show was designed just to turn people against each other, and that seemed terrible.  At some point I decided to watch it and I was quickly hooked.  I don't enjoy the social part of the game very much, but the "challenges" each week are such fun to watch.  Russ & I have often talked about how much fun it would be to be on the Survivor crew and get to build all of these sets for the different challenges.  Plus the location is usually tropical and we always love to see the ocean, waves, and sealife.  

One year I watched a season of Survivor while doing a lot of sewing.  I am ashamed to say that the triplets could identify each person on the show and intelligently discuss how they were doing.  At that point I was certain that we had been watching too much tv!

 

By myself:

At Christmastime when I was working long hours on the girls' dresses I needed something to watch to keep me going.  But it had to be a certain kind of show--it had to meet all of my regular criteria (decent, not gross, interesting enough) but it also had to be something that would still entertain me even if I wasn't looking at the screen.  Numb3rs turned out to be great for this--I went long stretches of time without doing more than glance at the screen, yet I always was able to keep track of what was going on and the storyline kept me interested.

My fallback when I'm sewing alone is a very old videotaped from tv copy of the BBC Pride & Prejudice.  Every year at Christmas while I'm sewing I also watch You've Got Mail and It's a Wonderful Life, and sometime during the year I watch Emma too.

So there you have it, future self or future family, a moment in time of our tv viewing habits...