Family Movie Night

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Family Movie Night – Toy Story and Babies

January 20, 2011 in Family Movie Night | 1 comment

Over Christmas we converted Family Movie Night into Christmas Movie Fest. We mostly watched the stuff you can record off the TV: the claymation shorts and Frosty and Mickey’s Christmas and things like that.  As always, mine and Adam’s favorite was The Grinch.  Sam seems to be in love with Frosty.  We watched that three times.

This past weekend, we got back into our habit and watched Toy Story.  I felt the same way about it that I did when it first came out – it was okay.  Usually I like a movie with a conflict between two good guys, but in this case, I wanted Woody to be good and Buzz Lightyear to be bad.  I’m not sure why, but I just can’t get over that.  Sam liked it, and she’s been drawing rocket ships ever since.

Another movie we’ve been watching a lot of is the documentary, Babies.  First, I watched it on my iPad.  Then I put it on for Sam to keep her busy for a few minutes.  She was fascinated.  So we’ve been watching bits of it here and there for a couple of weeks now.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s a great rental.  There is no narration – just scenes of four babies as they grow from birth to about one year old.  One is from Mongolia, one from Africa, one from Tokyo, and one from San Francisco.  The scenes are juxtaposed so that you can observe the differences in the cultures and also, the similarities in the babies.  I enjoyed seeing the difference between the African mom (I liked her) and the Mongolian mom (I hated her).  I also enjoyed seeing the African baby chewing on an animal bone that was lying in the dirt and then seeing the American parents using a lint roller to remove any possible particles of dirt from their baby.  Hilarious!  Now, whenever Sam does something gross, Adam says, “bones” and I chill out.  But all the babies made the “mama” sound, they all put things in their mouths, and they all learned to walk.  I see new things in this movie every time I watch it, and I think its a great one for kids, too.

Miscellaneous Update

December 14, 2010 in Family Movie Night, Homemaking, Pregnancy | No comments

I feel like I MUST get a blog post up today, but it’s impossible to come up with a coherent subject lately.  I figure that by giving this a title of “Miscellaneous Update,” I’ll feel less pressure to have any kind of theme.  So here it goes:

  • I’ve now done four injections of Lupron.  It’s easy as pie and doesn’t hurt a bit.  The first one was stressful in exactly the way I expected:  I felt uncertain that I was getting the dosage right and getting rid of air bubbles and all of that.  But after the first time, it’s been no problem.  Sam keeps asking to watch and I’d totally let her except that I keep forgetting.  But doing it with her around is not the big issue that I had feared.
  • We had Family Movie Night on Saturday and watched some weird Rudolph spin-off – something about the Lost Isle of Toys.  I really disliked it.  The music was bland and the story was preachy.  We’re getting our classic Rudolph from Netflix later this week!
  • Today or tomorrow, I swear, I’m going to start planning my Jewish Christmas dinner.  We’re having one or two guests, and it will be simple in every way except that I’ll cook for two days.  I love it!
  • Our Italy plans are slowly progressing.  I booked the airline tickets last week.  I still haven’t booked hotels, though.  Everything is turning out to be more complicated than I had anticipated.  Prices are higher, there were less flights to choose from, etc.  But now that the flight is booked I have a sense that THIS REALLY IS GOING TO HAPPEN.  Woohoo!
  • We’re working on refinancing our house and it is also turning out to be much more complicated than I had anticipated.  Did you know that a large check might take up to ten business days to clear?  I suspect this is a new phenomenon due to post 9.11 financial regulations (or maybe other new regulations).  My bank told me that it has not always taken that long.  I planned things around certain timing and now the whole thing might fail because of this.  Regulations – arg!
  • I still have tons of Christmas shopping to do.  In fact, I must leave right now to do exactly that.  Bye!

FMN – Jack Frost

December 7, 2010 in Family Movie Night | 5 comments

We were again too busy this weekend to do a real Family Movie Night, but Adam came home a bit early last night and we caught the 1979 claymation special Jack Frost.  As Adam said, it sucked.  Or, as I said, it blew.  Sam was mildly entertained and the popcorn was good, though.

We’ve been recording airings of all of those old Christmas specials from our childhoods off the TV for the past couple of years – Frosty the Snowman, the Grinch, etc.  But they don’t seem to be airing the claymation Rudolph anymore, so I’m going to have to get it on Netflix.  I wonder what’s up with that.

What’s your favorite Christmas movie or TV show?

Cats, Fairies, and Supermodels

November 26, 2010 in Family Movie Night, Pets | 2 comments

I didn’t intend to watch this kind of movie for Family Movie Night – it’s really a kids’ only kind of flick – but Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue was okay.  I stayed awake and I laughed at the fat, mean cat a couple of times.

Speaking of cats, we almost put ours to sleep today.  He’s been peeing in places other than the litterbox and howling at night and tearing up the carpet and really just doing all the evil things cats do.  We put him on Prozac last week because we’re so desperate.  But he didn’t pee at all for at least two days so this morning we called the vet and they said it would cost $1200-$2000 to unblock him.  (He has a condition where crystals form in his bladder and can block his urethra, a potentially fatal problem which he’s been treated for once in the past.) We are not spending any more money on this cat when all he does is cause us stress, so we prepared ourselves for the worst.  Our only hope was that he might pee out of sheer terror as soon as we put him in his carrier.

We got “lucky” and he did just that.  I can’t say I’m all that relieved.  In that hour or so when I thought this might be his final day with us, I felt a huge burden lifting off of me.  No more allergy attacks, no more dread of cat-urine-smell every time I enter a room, no more unwanted half-hour serenades at midnight and sunrise, no more pawing at Sam’s bedroom door to awaken her to get my attention, no more claw caps, infected scratch wounds, or Achilles-tendon bites (cats must have an instinct about that vulnerable area of the human body), and no more contests to see who can get down the stairs undamaged when six legs are twisted together in unnatural ways.

We’ve decided to give him two weeks to shape up.  If the Prozac doesn’t kick in and help him by then, it’s over.  I’ll miss him a little bit, but not as much as I’ve missed my last cat, Geddy.  (We put him down while I was pregnant with Sam.  He was 17 and he’d been with me my entire adult life.)  I think Adam loves Jinx a bit more than I do, but he’s okay with it, too.

The real heartwrenching part of this is how it might affect Sam.  She loves this cat.  She probably spends an hour a day tormenting him.  (Now you know why he needs Prozac.) We put the claw caps on him because she never did learn to avoid getting scratched.  Actually, she learned, but not the lesson we would want; she learned that if she provokes him, he’ll attack her and she can try to duck out of the way and if she does it is HILARIOUS and if she doesn’t then Mommy or Daddy will give her hugs and cuddles.  Hey, it’s a win-win!

So, I guess I’m pulling for him just a little bit.  And seeing that fat, mean cat in the movie reminded me that I can’t really complain.  I knew what I was getting into when we brought him home ten years ago.  All cats are like supermodels – they’re gorgeous, vain, stupid, vindictive, petty, and prone to hissy-fits.  In other words, they’re entertaining.

Family Movie Night – Monsters, Inc.

November 8, 2010 in Family Movie Night | 1 comment

Our on-demand cable service has a category just for Pixar movies.  Saturday night I read off the titles and brief descriptions to Sam:

  • Cars (it’s about cars)
  • Toy Story (it’s about toys)
  • Monster’s Inc. (it’s about monsters)
  • A Bug’s Life (it’s about bugs)
  • The Incredibles (it’s about superheroes)
  • Ratatouille (it’s about a rat)
  • Wall-E (it’s about a robot)

As I expected, she said, “MONSTERS?????????”

Then she said, “What’s that called again?” and I told her, “Monster’s, Inc.”  She said, “I want to watch that one.  Yeah, yeah.”

The whole movie, she kept asking where the ink was.  The fact that one of the main monsters was a kind of octopus didn’t help.

Adam and I loved this movie when it came out but both of us had forgotten all of it except for that amazing scene with the doors in the warehouse at the end.  The movie has some really sweet parent/child love moments.  When Sully’s friend Mike berates him for taking risks for the sake of the child, Boo, he tries to remind Sully about all the values they have given up: their work, their goals, their friendship.  Sully replies, “None of that matters now.”  And Adam chimed in, “Not now that he has a child.”

I totally missed that the first time around.

Family Movie Night – Bad Guys

October 24, 2010 in Family Movie Night | No comments

Something dreadful has happened that makes me realize that I have way too much on my mind:  I forgot to mention that we watched The Princess Bride on one of our previous Family Movie Nights.

Inconceivable!

I have no idea what Sam took away from this movie.  She kept asking us why we were laughing, and I know she hated the end because I cried and she still doesn’t understand the good cry yet.  But I do know she was fascinated by the “bad guy” in black with the mask who turned into the “good guy.”  If I haven’t mentioned it, Sammy is obsessed with good guys and bad guys.  She only wants to watch movies with bad guys in them.  She also likes classical music because it has bad guys in it. (Think about it – half of classical music could be visualized as bad guys chasing princesses through the forest.)

We watched Mary Poppins this weekend.  There was a policeman in the opening scene and Sam was transfixed: “Is that a bad guy?  Does he kill people?”  (She’s still confused by the whole Nazi thing.)  No real bad guys in this one, but she seemed to like it anyway.  I didn’t remember the movie very well, and I fell asleep for part of it.  Some of the musical numbers were fun, but otherwise I didn’t like it.  Wasn’t there a speech by the chimney sweep about how selfish the father was?  I was dozing at that point.  But any movie that gets Sammy screaming, “They’re dancing on the roof!  Look, mommy!  That’s SO funny!” is a hit.

This FMN thing is also a hit.  Sam is just the right age to start watching these movies (as I’ll write about in my next post) and it is pure joy to share them with her.

Family Movie Night

October 20, 2010 in Family Movie Night | 7 comments

While I’m on the subject of family culture, I’ve been meaning to write about our latest chosen tradition:  Family Movie Night.  (Spoilers alert – I won’t give too much away, but scan the movie titles below if you’re concerned.)

Adam and I have been eagerly awaiting the time when Sam would be old enough to enjoy movies with us, and now is that time!  Most Saturday nights, we watch a movie together.  It has to be something that we all are likely to enjoy, so no Barbie movies, even though I think they’re great movies for kids.

For our first movie, we watched the original Dumbo.  We didn’t have anything on hand so we picked a dollar movie from the pay-per-view menu.  Adam and I thought we’d enjoy it, but we didn’t.  I’m not really sure if Sam did either, but she did watch the whole thing.  It was all pretty senseless, and the scene where Dumbo got drunk was positively weird.  The good part, though, is that I finally learned where my favorite song from one of Sammy’s baby CDs came from.

Next, we watched Enchanted.  We all enjoyed that one.  I thought it was a little bit like Galaxy Quest (but not as great), in that it poked fun at a movie genre without being completely cynical.  It took the fundamental values of the genre seriously (well, mostly) while laughing at inconsquentials like talking animals and old-fashioned costumes.  Seeing Susan Sarandon as an evil queen was a bonus, and we watched the fart scene about five times over for Sam’s benefit.  But besides potty humor, I know that the film impacted Sam because she spent many days role-playing with her dolls having a “true love’s kiss.”  Sweet!

Next up was The Little Mermaid.  I’d heard such good things about this one, but I was disappointed.  Ariel was definitely an admirable heroine, but the story itself didn’t do much for me.  It wasn’t bad, it just didn’t live up to my expectations.

Finally, this weekend we watched Finding Nemo, one of mine and Adam’s most beloved movies from any genre.  My favorite part is when Dory and Marlin are inside the whale and she says (paraphrasing), “Come on! Everything is going to be all right!”  And he says, “But how do you know that?  How do you know that something bad isn’t going to happen?”  And she pauses and then says, “I don’t!”  And then they act.  The theme of this movie is motivation by love, not by fear.  And the theme is not something tacked on to some meaningless eye-candy for (what some adults believe to be) mindless children.  The whole movie is integrated around this theme, and it’s a grand adventure, funny, sweet, charming, and beautiful to look at.  If you haven’t seen it, you must.

Some of these movies had some scary parts, but Sam didn’t seem to be bothered by them.  She was definitely sad for Nemo’s mom when she died, and she talked about the queen turning into the dragon in Enchanted for many days in that scared-curious way that kids seem to have.  I’m sure much of the content of the movies was over Sam’s head, but she probably understands a lot more than she can express.

I plan to make reviews of the movies we watch on Family Movie Night a regular part of The Little Things, so, until next time,

just keep swimming.