Two days ago, I turned in our cable boxes.

I KNOW, RIGHT?!

It was like cutting an umbilical cord made of wires & screws.  I even  got a little misty-eyed as I shut down the DVR for the final time, saying goodbye to the saved Carolina basketball games of the 2008-2009 season & my Lipstick Jungle episodes (curse you, NBC, for cancelling my weekly dose of Brooke Shields!).    When I tell folks of our new freedom, the first question is always “WHY?!” quickly followed by, ”What will you do about television?!”  The first, I shall address in a moment.  The reply to the second?  Not a damn thing.

Nate & I have discussed cancelling cable for the past year, once Harrison made his entry into the world.  Mostly, to save money.  We are constantly searching for ways to cut costs so that I may one day stay home, but alas, knocking $100 off our monthly bills doesn’t quite cut it yet.  & when it boils down to time, we’re looking at maybe 4 hours in the evenings between arriving home & bedtime.  & those 4 hours will already be full of dinner, bedtime routines, working out, & getting ready for the following day.   But we never could bring ourselves to make the first move.  Until this week.

The first nudge came from an old friend of mine who cancelled her own cable in favor of Apple TV as a response to her new full-time job as a mother.  It’s always easy to fantasize about cutting something so drastic (at least, drastic in American culture), but so hard to pull the plug.  But to see someone else take that step?  It’s like a light goes off that says, “HEY!  You can do this & not wither away into irrelevant oblivion!”

Drawing inspiration on Nish’s courage, I tried to cancel.  No, really.  I actually called the cable company on Tuesday morning & told them I was cancelling.  “But Mrs. Blair,” the customer service rep asked with a gasp.  “How will you watch your shows?  You don’t really think you can be completely televison-less, do you?”  I stuttered.  “I’ll tell you what,” the rep crooned.  “I’ll lower your bill for you.  How about that?  $98 per month?  You’ll have to cancel your DVR, but that is $50 off your bill.”  A few nice words later, I hung up.

DAMN IT ALL TO HELL.  He got me.  That conniving little bastard, probably high-fiving the headset in the cubicle next to him, smug over keeping one more idiotic fish in the Time Warner sea.

But then Wednesday afternoon, we received our cable bill.  $140.  With a notice of rate increases that would raise our bill to roughly $150  per month.   This tidbit of information was about as well received as Tiger Woods at a Promise Keepers meeting.

So Thursday, I steeled my mind.  Crawled in the dust behind both televisions, disconnected the boxes, loaded them & Harrison up in the Subaru, & drove downtown to the cable company.  Where I promptly dropped a box of equipment on the counter & said, “We quit.”  I like to think that I looked quietly determined & that is why the lady silently took the equipment with no further offers, but the truth is that between Harrison squawking in his car seat, the dirt smear on my cheek from the dusty cable boxes, & me still feel duped by the customer service rep, I probably looked one Prozac away from a padded cell.

Forty-eight hours into being a cable-free family, Nate & I both agree it is the best thing we’ve done since reproducing.  We haven’t even hooked the cord into the wall to receive our free channels.  It’s so easy to lose track of the mindless hours we spend in front of a television, not paying attention to each other or life.  Today, we woke up & fixed a hot breakfast – biscuits & gravy for him, Nutrisystem pancakes for me.  We played with Harrison as a family for over an hour - not just one of us half-assedly batting a rattle while the other channel surfs.  Nate emptied the dishwasher without being asked (because y’all, he wasn’t sucked into a golf tournament).  We read more -outloud & to ourselves.  We play board games.  Our Wii now hosts several old school games that take us back 20 years.  We laugh more – with each other, not at a cartoon prancing across the screen.

So our television stand may be empty.  But our lives are far more full of this:

and this:

I think we’ve gained more than $120 in our bank account, don’t you?