I read an article in a national magazine about a family with 11 children a couple years ago. This didn’t impress me too much since I had 8 at the time.

I could relate to hosting the equivalent of a dinner party every night, confronting Mt. Washmore on a daily basis, and spending most waking hours in the van.

The part that stuck with me the most, and that I didn’t understand at all, was one of the family rules. The kids had to be at least 11 years old before they could touch a DVD.  It was a warm and comforting thought. No more scratches, smudges or broken devices. I just can’t imagine how to make that work without removing all of them from the house. The DVDs that is, not the children.

My son Max lobbies for a daily dose of The Wiggles feeding DVDs into the player until he gets the right one. Except for being afraid of Captain Feathersword, he’d be content to trade his family for Greg, Murray, Jeff, and Anthony. He found me sleeping on the couch one day and yelled “Wake up Jeff!” until I came around.

One day, the VCR just stopped. Within a week, the DVD player followed suit, though the DVD player was more dramatic. It whirred. It shook. Then it stopped. And an amazing thing happened. Brian, mentally dulled by a chronic lack of sleep and the pain of a sprained ankle, decided to fix them both.

For years, this man I married considered the use of a hammer to hang a picture as serious construction work. Now he sat at the kitchen table confidently removing the backs of the VCR and DVD players.

Reading the list of warnings on the back of the devices reminded him that he might get knocked out of his chair or worse from a stray electrical charge, but he was undeterred. When you have toddlers and teens in the house, there isn’t much left that can scare you. Besides, he was coming off of only 3 hours of sleep after a night up with the baby. He wasn’t thinking clearly.

Inside the VCR, he found a cardboard box that had once housed an actual tape. It looked like it had been there a while and explained why the in/out mechanism occasionally got stuck. Inside the DVD player, he found 3 DVDs under the tray. That probably explained the whirring and shaking that had recently developed.

What nobody has been able to explain yet is how to make a childproof DVD player.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Introduction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.