Last week Nicholas and I took Oprah's Live With Less Challenge. Two weeks ago she did a show on waste and spotlighted two families for intervention. For a week, they were asked to:
- live without TV/laptops/iPods
- take 5 minute showers
- use no paper products
- not shop or eat out
The show was really powerful and at the end Oprah challenged everyone to try it themselves. Well you know Oprah says jump and I say how high? So, I let Nicholas know the rules. Oprah allowed 1 hour a night of TV and I changed it to laptop or TV because I thought I would want to blog about our progress.
However, as the week progressed, I really got into the challenge and I didn't use of the hour until Thursday. I mean sometimes you just need some Jon and Kate Plus 8 in your life and that's that. The rest of the week though I really enjoyed the challenge. I felt like Nicholas and I spent more times actually interacting rather than just sitting in the same room together. I know Maggie benefited because we took her for several long walks at night. The only thing I was surprised by was how often we forgot to turn light out. I felt like I spent a lot of time walking around turning lights out - now I know why my parents got so frustrated all those times!
Nicholas had a tough time with the only 30 minutes (we split the hour between us) of laptop time. He used all 30 minutes on Monday and Tuesday and went way over on Wednesday and Thursday. I think part of the problem was once he cracked the computer to put in receipts it was hard to close it. This was part of the reason I didn't blog because I was afraid once I opened it up and got on the internet to update it would be difficult to let it go.
For those of you who watch Wife Swap, this is the part when I say what's changed and what's stayed the same after the challenge. I'm going to keep timing my showers because otherwise it's too easy for the time to get away from you. We'd already talked about stop buying power towels so this was just an easy way to start. I'd also like to do one TV/laptop free night a week. Overall, I'm coming away with a better of understanding how of we can check out and be pretty wasteful and how good it feels to turn that behavior around.
As usual, Oprah enhances our lives. ;)
1 comment:
The shower thing would be easy for me. I seriously take 3 minute showers. Get in, get out. Thats how I roll.
The TV and internet would be more difficult for me.
I blame it on the fact that Craig and I lived apart for so long that we've already talked about everything :) He and I sitting in a room without the tv on would either mean we're sleeping or *not sleeping* wink wink
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