I have grown to like making New Year resolutions and like to think that over the years I have changed our lives on the farm in small but significant ways through trying to keep to them. First up for 2008 is to make a concentrated effort to walk more. This may seem a strange one for a farmer, but believe you me, you can quite easily do a full days work without stretching your legs any more that climbing in or out of the cab of your pick-up/tractor.
Now that the cows are in the barn for the winter, all their feeding is done with large round bales, and the sheep are fed oats which are dispensed onto the ground in neat little piles by a trailer we pull behind the quad bike – so not much room for exercise in the day to day routine. My saviour is our young dog Maggie, who if left to her own devices will harass the poultry all day long. The only solution is to chain her up while not in use and so she requires a couple of good long runs each day. This will do us both the world of good a as an unexpected bonus has provided me with uninterrupted thinking time away from the kids/phone/office – a real bonus.
Without doubt though, the star resolution this year has been to limit the time the kids spend watching TV. I suspect that this is a bit of an issue in any house and is nearly impossible to handle without a major row. When I was a kid at secondary school I was the only one in the class without a TV - and so considered a bit of a freak; nowadays our own offspring think its too bad that we don’t let them have a TV in their bedrooms!
There must be a third way I thought, and so I scoured the Internet and purchased a wonderful little gadget called TVTimer. This simple little box takes your TV’s plug and locks it in to a small timer, and you can then set the hours of each day when the TV will come on. This is a bit fiddly, but well worth persevering with. Our TV will now only come on for an hour in the morning (for the sake of the youngest) and then remains dead until 6.30 in the evening (in time for the teens to watch Hollyoaks) and then cuts off at 10.30 – thus making sure we all get a decent nights sleep.
If you are desperate to watch something out of these times then you can of course video any program (the timer only effects the TV) and watch it later. This all takes a bit of getting used to, but as I keep saying to the kids, with a stroke I have given them all something that money can’t buy – several hours a week of their lives back!
Actually they have accepted it surprisingly well (because, I think it is much harder to get angry with an inanimate object that is preventing you from watching the box than it is to harangue a tired parent), and for me the proof of the pudding was when on day three (of the rest of our lives) I walked into our sitting room (formally the TV room) on a wet afternoon and there was my eldest, sitting on the sofa, quietly reading a book – it almost brought a tear to my eye.