Movie Night: Smart Move or Sh*tty Mistake

Yesterday was, hands down, the worst weather day of the month.  I’m offended by January’s existence, in general.  We really only need one additional month of winter after Christmas, thank you very much.  And yesterday had the nerve to be rainy.  Not drizzly and oddly warm like the day before (thanks, climate change!). It was very cold, and while not quite at the scientific freezing point, it was far beyond the freezing point of my finger tips.  The rain was hard and steady.  As I was doing the late afternoon round of school pick-ups, grumbling to myself about how I wanted to be in my bed with my electric footwarmer, I had a brilliant idea… or so I thought at that time.

It was the perfect opportunity to introduce the idea of “movie night” to my kids.  The twins are three years old now and I thought their attention span was long enough to handle a 90-minute movie.  And while my 8 year old was still scared of the high emotions of most Disney movies, surely he would be able to tolerate something that was “young” enough for his siblings.  I could serve a simple, tidy dinner in the living room, watch the movie, and then it would be time to head upstairs for bed!  We could bypass the random bursts of fighting that happen during the dinner prep and all of the management required to feed three kids at the table by yourself  (lots of water spills and refills and a little bit of falling out of chairs).

I pitched this idea to the kids and they were excited!  I congratulated myself on being a mom-genius and then packmuled three coats, three backpacks, my own water bottle, snack container, coffee mug, and two damp Lunar New Year paper crowns into the house.  I should have known that things were off when I got inside and realized that one child had run BACK to the van because his head had gotten wet on his first walk up the driveway because he didn’t have his coat on…and he wanted his coat on so that he could put his hood up.  There was no way that I was going to walk back out in the rain to bring his coat, put it on him, and indulge this little blip of logic, but, thankfully, big brother was in just the right mood to come to the rescue.  He ran back outside, climbed into the van, had some private and convincing conversation with his sibling, and then carried him back into the house.

After peeling off wet clothes, I immediately turned on the TV and started scrolling through our streaming services to find an appropriate movie.  Twin A requested “the red one,” so I opened Netflix, which leads with all of the shows that you’ve recently watched.  Kids started shouting all at once for the 7- to 22- minute episodes of cartoons that they wanted to watch.  I reminded them that we were going to pick a movie for “movie night” and that we needed to look at some options to find something that we all agreed on.  This was about 4:05pm.  What happened next will haunt my dreams of ever seeing consensus on anything fun we ever do for the next 15 years.  Every movie that I flipped to resulted in simultaneous squeals of delight and bellowing “Noooooooo”s.  Remember back when the government still seemed mostly normal, and that one Congressperson shouted “You lie” to President Obama during his speech?  It was like that, but over and over again.  

The closest I could get to an agreement was one enthusiastic yes, one mild acquiescence, and one STRONG dissent.  I prepared everyone for disappointment by pointing out that our solution would have to be picking something that only two kids wanted to watch and then have another movie night next week when the other kid would get to pick the movie.  And then I quietly did that private math that all parents know how to do, quickly calculating which child’s frustration I had the energy to deal with that day.  Was it the one who would have a short-lived, but very physical outburst? Or the one who wouldn’t complain much but wouldn’t attend to the movie either and need to be interacted with and supervised the whole time?  Or was it the one who would lazily sit through the whole movie and grumble about his dissatisfaction, repeating the lines of dialogue with the words “dumb” and “stupid” peppered in?

And then, as if by some rainy day magic, just as I was about to piss off the grumbler, I scrolled past the movie “Home,” which featured a brown-skinned, curly-haired girl and a round purple alien on the thumbnail photo, and all of my kids said, “That one!”  And you know what, I wasn’t excited about it, but DONE.  

I started the movie (everyone was already settled into their favorite seats, chill Twin A on the couch under a blanket, sensory-seeker Twin B alternating between being curled up in and dangling over the edge of the armchair closest to the large TV, and the big one confidently draped across the “good chair”) and then headed into the kitchen to start reheating old pizza and prepping a dinner that I call “smorgasbord” and really just means a bunch of healthy snacks together on a plate.  The movie started, as so many family movies do, with a lot of action and conflict, launching the plot quickly.  Busy-bodied Twin B kept running in to tell me “This movie is not my favorite,” but the others were invested and comfortable, so I let her ride through her anxieties until the vibe calmed down.  

I served dinner in the living room and curled up on the couch with my taco salad made from leftovers and thoroughly enjoyed the last half of the movie with my kids.  In spite of the headache of the launch of movie night, overall, it was turning out to be a nice experience.  I was back to feeling all puffed up with pride over being a mom-genius.  I even gave each of my kids a handful of small chocolate cookies and I almost never offer any kind of dessert (not because I think it’s bad but simply because I want to eat dessert by myself after they’re all asleep).  THIS was the way to do a rainy day!

And then it was 6pm and everything started to unravel. It wasn’t quite bedtime for preschoolers who had napped at school, but definitely too late to start anything new.  I decided to start the bedtime process, but allow it to go slowly and be lengthy to kill the in-between time.  Sometimes, we drag out a long evening with “Book Fest,” which is another little stroke of mom-genius, when we read, like, SIX books instead of the usual 3 or 4 before bedtime.  

But, we did not make it to Book Fest that night.  No, the ensuing transition was mostly calamity, with every typically-easy-to-manage routine being interrupted by someone’s, EVERYONE’S, urgent need to go poop.  I guess that I had not realized that, on an average day, during all of the evening hours, in between the fights and the begging me for snacks 10 minutes before dinner and the chaos during the meal and the herding-cats action of bedtime, each of my kids takes a turn to go poop, mostly without fanfare.  Yet, on a “movie night,” when I held them captive for an extra two hours in the living room, with non-stop entertainment and food, their biological urges were suppressed, not to be discovered until it was time to be doing something else.  In between all of the pooping, bathing, pooping, teeth-brushing, pooping, and putting on pajamas, there were still plenty of fights.

So, I don’t know.  Movie night?  Was it really a mom-genius move or was it a rookie mistake?  I think we’ll try again next week because I need to collect more data.