We've been television free for nearly seven years and there are only two things that make me really miss owning a TV: baseball season and Saturday mornings.
The baseball season problem was easily solved by going old school and listening to games on the radio or via the iPhone MLB application (easily one of the best iPhone apps around for baseball fans). Sometimes, though, you just need to see the game live. For big match ups, we take the kids to local food joints that are likely to have the game playing. (Our favorite is Old Pro in Palo Alto. The food can be mediocre but the atmosphere is fantastic for watching a ball game).
Saturday mornings were a different story. A simple pleasure for me as a kid was waking up early and watching cartoons while everyone else was still in bed. I want my kids to have a taste of that, and so I've been letting them watch cartoon DVDs every so often during the early morning weekend hours. They enjoy watching the videos, but there's always a struggle over which one to view. Q. is a sensitive media dude; he doesn't like some of the shows that his big brother enjoys, and that's okay. It sometimes makes it difficult to find a happy medium.
But there's this new little site called Jaroo.com and it's kind of rocking my -- and my kids' world -- right now. It's like Hulu.com for little kids, and offers free viewing of television shows and movies online. What struck me about Jaroo.com is the content -- a good portion of the shows are vintage stuff from when I was a kid. Which means I can trust those shows because I've already seen them. (Jaroo is part of Cookie Jar Group, which produces -- or has produced -- many of those shows. It makes sense to include the old stuff, but they could have bypassed them in place of newer, more popular shows. I'm glad they didn't.)
This morning I told the boys I wanted them to watch a show that I used to watch when I was little. Then I turned on "The Littles." Seven knew of them because he'd already read The Littles book, but was so excited to know that this was something we could share (it helped that I completely remembered every word to the intro song). Q. fell in love with the cute song and the eerie and adorable cute characters and their adventure.
We do put some strong limits on our kids' digital time. But a quickie cartoon on Saturday mornings with Jaroo.com is going to be a keeper, so long as they keep adding more "vintage" shows and keep the sponsored ads incredibly age appropriate to the show and limited in time (under 30 seconds).
Kudos to them for a nice site. Good stuff.
