Monday, April 2, 2012

Earth Hour nightmares

"What are we doing for Earth Hour!" screamed The Complicated One. It was the Saturday morning of Earth Hour. Clearly he'd been dreaming about it, and plainly he'd decided our response was inadequate.

Last week his science teacher had asked everyone in class what they were doing for Earth Hour.

She didn't seem impressed by The Complicated One's answer that his parents would be going to bed early and hoping for their annual night of uninterrupted sleep.

Since when do kindy kids have science teachers? Next he'll want a financial adviser for his Dollarmites account.

Clearly he'd gone to bed worried that his parents weren't taking Earth Hour seriously, and had nightmares about our inadequate response.

So he was demanding a family conference. Involving both his parents. At 5.30 in the morning.

You'll recall that Earth Hour coincided with the end of daylight savings. So as an added bonus, during our family conference we all got to enjoy the maximum period of darkness remaining until dawn - over 1 and a half hours to be fairly precise.

Earlier in the week I had laid out what I thought was a pretty comprehensive household response...
  1. We'd recently upgraded from our power-hungry plasma TV to a more energy efficient LED LCD model (I haven't really thrown the plasma away - just relocated it, but he doesn't need to know.)
  2. Mummy and daddy would turn off all the lights in the house and watch the LED LCD TV in darkness (we do this every night, but he doesn't need to know).
  3. We'd unplug the electric toothbrushes and the kettle.
  4. I'd needlessly capitalise Earth Hour in my blog.
  5. We could also unplug his nightlight.
Somehow he was still unimpressed.

In the end he settled for the toothbrushes and kettle.

But he thought his nightlight should remain on.

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