A Dream From God?

I had a dream the other night that I decided is from God. It flashed my children's lives in front of my eyes - complete with their hours and hours of television watching. Did I tell you the TV is a big babysitter in our house? Then I heard the message: "No more TV." God would say that, wouldn't he?

So I woke up and decided to put a nix on the TV watching for a week to see what happens.

OK, so I know that a lot of this is my guilt talking, but I don't think it's all guilt. I think it's me really telling myself that life can be better with less TV. Because my kids are behaving like cave men. They fight and fight and fight and fight and I yell and dad yells and it's just not good.

So we also instituted some rules. These would probably be very basic, simple rules at your house, but it's taken me 8 years to come up with:

Rule # 1 - No whining or shouting
Rule # 2 - No fighting with each other
Rule # 3 - No hitting or kicking

Violation of the aforementioned rules results in a time-out the number of minutes as the child's age.

I know you're thinking that any basic parent would have established these rules years and years ago (from infancy probably), but it takes me awhile to catch on to anything discpline related as I am so undisciplined myself.