Thursday night TV

I have a real weakness for Thursday night TV. Sorry, it cannot be helped. It started back in the days of "Must See TV:" Friends and ER! On the same night! And the night that was the de facto end of the week.

In homeschooling days, we did our best to finish up by Thursday. That left Fridays for finishing up what we hadn't finished up on Thursday, the official day to finish. That's what you get to do with homeschool - you get to CHOOSE when to do the schoolwork. We chose not to do it on Friday.

First, the ritual food purchase - In the grocery store we picked out 'dinner in a box' (not to be confused with frozen dinners, reserved for nights other than Thursday.) Dinner in a box was something like "Chicken with biscuits" or "Cheesy ham and potato bake" - dehydrated ingredients in a cardboard box, with sauce mix in a dry packet, and meat in a can. Mix the whole mess of faux food together with boiling water, bake it and voila - dinner. . . from a box. IN the grocery store, the young ones stood and looked at the boxes, imagining a steaming golden delicious looking saucy DINNER, just like on the front of that box. The fantasy of that perfect meal lured them in....to eating chicken from a little can drowned in sauce made from powder.


So, we unboxed our dinner and huddled together on the couch, watching Ross and Rachel muddle through parenthood, with "That Girl" and the original "Trapper John McIntyre" as Emma's grandparents. The young ones took a bath in between, then straight to high anxiety time in the ER, where once a guy's arm got cut off by a helicopter on the roof of the hospital, and he had no other injuries. (Consider that, seriously, smacked by the rotors of a helicopter on the windy and probably snowy roof of a hospital, and then chatting about it - albeit a little churned up - but still. OLD Thursdays....box dinners, impossibly adorable people being in love and not knowing it followed by gory tragedy and some more people being in the dark about how much in love they were with each other...all in the ER on ER. And sleeping late the next day, when everyone else was getting up and going to school.


Which sounds a lot like the NEW Thursdays. I am delighted to report that we are now impossibly sophisticated, thus no longer eat boxed dinners. The Office and Grey's Anatomy are the cornerstones of our new Thursday night, where we find some seemingly humble yet adorable people, my BFFs Pam and Jim, in love with each other, and didn't know it for a long time while over on Grey's, we find some more stunningly attractive people who are... desparately in love with each other but can't seem to let each other in on that key secret, amidst gory tragedy and miraculous cures. (No helicopter accidents here yet, but there have been people who carried on a day's worth of conversation impaled on a pole) The fact that Meredith and Derek are stealing passionate glances at the same time that Jim and Pam are sneaking flirtatious looks at each other is easily solved by Tivo. And we watch Top Chef again, because we like to layer our TV flavors. And as a sort of penance for all the years we ate the box dinners.

It appears that the main difference between the old Thursday night and the new is that we DO have to get up and go to school on Friday. So committing to Thursday night TV passion and medical miracles means homework time lost.

Last night, feeling particulary needy because the girls were watching Grey's somewhere else (traitors), I whined to my young son "Please watch The Office with me, please, please, please! I hate to watch it by myself...." So he did just that - he watched with me. And he never let his secret slip - until this morning. Stayed up really late to study for FOUR BIG TESTS and a quiz today! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty, I am indeed GUILTY of selfish mothering.

But still.... sometimes I really hate to watch by myself. And we didn't have FOUR BIG TESTS when we homeschooled. Just saying.
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