Procrastination is a Good Thing!

Last night the children and I got kicked out of the house. 

My husband was hosting the annual Fantasy Football Draft Night or Whatever The Heck It’s Called and the house was going to be filled with a bunch of big, smelly dudes all vying  to build the best pretend football team ever, which meant that the language would occasionally get a tad…heated?  Frantically aflutter?  Of the emphatically shouted four letter variety?

So we really weren’t kicked out, it was completely by choice to escape the Fevered Football Madness and Cowboy Show going on down in our basement and go see a movie.

We all wanted to see Despicable Me, but we waited so long to see it (it came out back in early July) that it was only in a few theatres, and only for a few showings.  We paid our admission price ($29!, Dear God in Heaven, Why???) then headed down the hall to the Despicable Me sign.

We opened the door, and…we were the only people in the theatre!  We were excited to have such a choice of seats, and, quite frankly, I allowed myself the pleasure of a short daydream sequence in my head where I wasn’t continually asking Jack to “sit down!  sh!  other people are behind us! don’t kick the seat! sh! your seat is not a playground! sh!” but reality kicked back in and I told the kids that someone else would probably arrive soon and I pushed that little fantasy deep, deep down inside me.
 
But no one else ever arrived.

Ten minutes into the movie, Jack asked if he could try out the front row.  “Yes!” I said in a normal, non-hushed voice, “Go for it!”  This was repeated often during the movie by various children.

There were a couple of dance scenes in the movie (Boogie Robots) and we got up and danced!

We passed our smuggled-in candy (take that, Outrageously Expensive Theatre!) back and forth and didn’t worry about crinkling wrappers.

I took both Maddie and Jack out for separate bathroom breaks and felt secure leaving the remaining children alone in the theatre (the bathroom was across the hall---I could see if anyone entered our theatre).

Ben and Jack, at one point, wanted to run up to the screen, jump up, wave their arms, and see if their shadows appeared on the movie.  And I let them.

And when Jack repeated movie lines and asked questions and told me about his day in his very loud Jack voice, I listened, and it was awesome!

Okay, so, movie review:  Despicable Me was genuinely funny, well-written, convincingly-voiced, had lots of physical gags that made the kids roar, and had a little adult humor for me (The Bank of Evil—formerly known as Lehman Brothers---did  anyone else catch that?).  But the empty movie theatre is what made that movie for us. 

Then we went home and the smelly guys were still there fussing about their teams, but there was leftover pizza on the counter so we forgave them (though it is hard to eat pizza with your fingers stuck in your ears to block the fancy words floating up from the basement).