media savvy (selectively)

Bedtime rolls around and the lads are getting testy with each other.  The elder one makes a menacing move toward the younger one.  Seeing this, my beloved says, "Be kind.  Rewind."

And then he and I have a good laugh about that one, as these bambini have no idea what that means.  Our VCR is stashed upstairs somewhere.  They did unearth a box of VHS tapes recently, but they didn't know what the funny objects were.   We used to tape episodes of Curious George on PBS as recently as two years ago on our VCR, but the elder lad wasn't even three then and wasn't hip to the medium used to record his favorite show.

This whole business of rewinding a rented movie before returning it is so entirely foreign to our bambini.   We used to have an online movie-rental subscription but let it lapse when the one movie we'd have checked out would sit for weeks upon weeks awaiting viewing, only to finally be sent back unwatched. And even those movies were on DVD, not VHS tapes (we won't even get into Beta tapes, which I remember vividly from my childhood).

These days both lads can operate the DVD player with ease -- at least selecting which one they want to watch from among a small list of approved fare (most with the words Curious George or Mighty Machines in the title) and loading or unloading the player as necessary. The elder lad knows to press "play", though with our set-up there is usually some fiddling of settings to be done which allows for parental intervention and squelches unauthorized viewing.  We're not "no TV", but it's not on all that much, and when it is, we are rarely watching it live and can thus skip commercials.

The relevance of a phrase like "be kind -- rewind."  in the media sense might be lost on these bambini, but it's actually full of virtue -- those of self-control and respect for others.  Its succinct delivery might just get through to them.  Mama can only hope, anyway...