Ah the end of summer, a depressing but exciting time for most. A time in which children prepare for a brand new year of school and a chance to see all of their friends again. However, this was not the case for homeschoolers such as myself and my older brother. For me and my older brother Will, August meant two things for us, the beginning of yet another year of homeschooling, and something far, far worse: TV fast month. You see, when my brother reached his impressionable age, my mother used a tip she had picked up from her many hours of listening to Christian radio. Mom decided to use what the people on the radio referred to as “TV fast month”. As the name implies, TV fast month was a time in which one would fast from media and entertainment, essentially forcing me and my brother into what we felt like were the dark ages.

Now, please realize that when I say I hated it at the time, I mean I really hated it. The worst part was that every year it got more and more difficult. This was mostly due to my brother getting older. You see, Will was getting into his teenage years, particularly the years that required every teenage boy to check his imagination at the door and learn to appreciate the more mature things in life. For many boys this meant bad things like smoking, drinking or worse, relationships.

However, Will was a special case, in his mind the most mature thing he could do was ride his bike to the library, grab a book on computer engineering and proceed to read said book in his room for hours. I was obviously irritated by my brother’s decision to grow up and leave me in the middle of childhood alone. In fact, the only way for Will and I to play something together was to break out the GameCube and play a little Mario Kart, thus for me August meant saying goodbye to Will for a month, because the only way for us to play together was restricted.

Normally August would consist of me doing my school work really early in the morning and then breaking out my old toys. There was an old knight castle that was my favorite by far. I would come up with epic stories for the little plastic residents to act out that had just as much drama, violence, and plot twist as any summer blockbuster. This is where I believe my extroverted nature is derived. I say that because we never had what many kids call a “play room” so all of my adventures and stories unfurled right in the middle of our living room where mom and dad and anyone else could hear every last detail of the fantasy epic that was taking place on the carpet.

As much fun as that castle was, the fact that my brother was absent for a majority of it still weighed heavily on me. Thus I resolved to find a way to lure him out of his room and away from his books. After a week of hard work and digging through old stuff, I had finally found the way, a board game tourney. Just like the knights of old or sports fans of today, no one can resist a good tournament.

However, in the absence of horses and swords to joust with –– or any athletic ability –– I had to settle for the abundance of board games we had collected over the years. I made the perfect bracket, beginning with a game of Life and moving right on to Battleship, game after game was played. Each victory gave the person extra money for the epic final showdown in Monopoly JR.

As it turns out, Will was much better at board games than I had originally anticipated. For me this meant two things, Will was certainly going to crush me and he was downstairs playing with me once again. It was a feeling of accomplishment I still remember to this day, as well as the crushing feeling of defeat when Will figured out it was Mr. Green in the Ballroom with the knife a solid hour before me. That was not nearly as bad as my abysmal efforts to beat him in Parcheesi, but that’s another story.

So how do i feel about TV fast after all these years? Well to tell the truth I think its a fantastic system that encouraged me and my brother to find more healthy ways of entertaining ourselves. In fact, if in the future I'm lucky enough to have a family of my own, then perhaps I'll have a simliar system for them, especially since technology is becoming a larger and larger part of many kid's childhoods. While tech for tots is not inherently a bad thing, I certainly see the value in children having to use their imaginations to tell their own stories or make their own games. So yeah I'll certainly have a TV fast for my children, and if they're bored one day, I'll sit them down and tell them numerous stories of what their uncle Will and I would do when we their age, man, poor kids...