Movie Night

About a month ago, Kiki began showing continued interest in the television for more than 12 minutes at a stretch.  Seizing upon this opportunity, my wife and I, lovers of movies, tried out a film on her.  Starting out at home, we were both pleasantly surprised when she sat through all of My Neighbor Totoro, and about a week later Cinderella.   

Emboldened by these successes, we decided to venture out into public, and went to a 6:30 showing of Brave.  Thankfully, because the movie has been out for weeks and we chose a theater that, like many in the suburbs, had started out as the end all be all place to be and has since regressed into little more than a crackhouse that happens to show movies, the theater was nearly empty, just a few other couples with kids.  Well, and the crackheads.  

We prepared as best we could since it was dinner time, sneaking in sandwiches, carrots, cookies, crackers, drinks, and, well, soup.  I know, an unusual movie snack choice, but we did discover that there's nothing quite like a warm bowl of soup during a movie.  So we went in prepared in case we got stuck in the theater for a day or two.  

It started off well enough, Kiki rapaciously staring at the screen, quietly absorbing all the theater had to offer.  Unfortunately this only lasted through the first 23 seconds.  Then she started asking

"Who's she?"

"What's her name?"
"Why's her name Merida?"

"Where's her Mama?"
"Is that her Mama?"
"Where's her Dada?"
"Is that her Dada?"

and so on, until we had outlined the entire family tree for every character in the movie.  Once that was settled, she moved on to exploring the theater.  Which mainly consisted of crawling up and down the main aisle.  While giggling uncontrollably.  Once she was done with that we returned to the questions ("Why's she doing that?"), interspersed with further explorations.  Finally, having exhausted her searches and her questions, she settled into a chair to watch the movie.  Oh, the chair she chose was across the theater from us.  But, thankfully, when she had further questions she would just yell them to us across the theater.

Yep, it was quite an adventure.  I think I'll wait about, oh, 14 years until we try this again.