Friday Madness

Many, many people like Fridays. I have nothing personal against them, but they tend NOT to be my favorite day of the week. Some Fridays, like next Friday, are First Lego League meeting days, which are a headache unto themselves (but I luuuuuv my team!).

Fridays in the school year are for our homeschool coop, which is great, cool, and helpful (that use of the Oxford comma is in honor of my Baby Bro!), but are at the same time a pain-in-the-you-know-whats.

Today was neither a homeschool coop nor a Lego meeting, which should have rendered it rather harmless, but alas! No, it was a pain-in-the-you-know-what, nevertheless!

The Monkey is having a tough week. Do three-year-olds teethe? Have mid-life crises? I don't know, but he is having issues of some kind. All week long has been one battle after another. Lots of fits. Lots of tantrums. Lots of madness. (Multiple episodes of "poopy-on-the-foot", which lead to episodes of  "poopy-on-my-floor", and the words "Mommy, you look like a cow", kind of show case my week...)

Which means this is going on day FIVE of having a headache for me. Ugh.

Today was going to be a big day. Today we were going to see Cars 2.

Okay, so this is too dark, but you can kind of make out the Monkey here...Pretend it is a Nintedo 3D, and hold it just right...

The Monkey's first big screen movie! He love, loves, loves Cars. We have watched it something close to a zillion times, and we own almost every Hot Wheels style car there is. So, I was all psyched up. The Monkey was not so sure. The noise, the darkness, the loud explosions....it was not the best of times, but it certainly leaned towards the worst of times! In fact, the Monkey asked to go potty twice during the movie, in spite of having a diaper on for the occasion. I told myself it was because he was progressing in his potty training, but the reality is, he just wanted an excuse to leave the movie. After two potty trips and an in-house fit, I gave up and took him to the lobby. The three older boys finished watching and met us later. Wrestling with a heavy three-year-old is like lifting animated weights. Can you say "back pain"?

In spite of my recent success on the South Beach Diet (whoo hoo), I ditched it all for some comfort food this afternoon. A pounding headache and a desire to auction off my preschooler led to a small feast on my part. There is a reason it is called "comfort" food. Ahhhhhh!

Found a stash of hidden candy from Easter. This might have saved my life today.

Friday Thoughts:

• The preview for the new Winnie the Pooh movie looks so sweet! I am going to see it, even if the Monkey won't.
• Smurfs looks s-t-u-p-i-d (Can't say the word. Gets me in trouble with the Monkey every time). Based solely on the preview, if you replace the Smurfs with small, talking chipmunks, I believe I have seen that movie already.
• Ditto for the new Spy Kids movie.
• The trailer for the new Muppet movie was clever! At first, I was thinking, why are they advertising a romance movie to the young crowd, but then Kermit showed up. Good one!
• Cars 2 could have done without the political oil message. Just seemed out of place. Also, there were a lot of car "deaths". A little more mature movie than I was expecting. The big boys liked it, though (even the 13-yr-old!)
• Do you know about Time4Learning? They have an amazing deal for new members right now - a huge savings! It is an on-line home education program that totally rocks! We have used it for years now, and love it. It is based on a monthly fee. We use it one or two months a year to supplement our curriculum, but it would make a great summer course to stop the summer brain drain our kids tend to experience! Check it out!
• A facebook friend, Julie M recommended this link which I think is brilliant! Do you have an old or recalled crib you do not know what to do with? Consignment Mommies gives some really smart ideas for re-purposing cribs (love the chalkboard and the bench!)
• Keep watching! Deep in the Heart has been invited to join the BlogHer network! I am super excited about this, and will be linking up in the next week! Whoo hoooo!

Have a great weekend!

Heresy (of the Literary Kind)

It was announced in March that Jennifer Garner will be in a Disney movie, playing Agatha Christie's Miss Marple.

Yeah.....let that sink in a moment.....

First -Yes, Jennifer Garner is gorgeous.

Second - Disney has a tendency to practice eminent domain on story-lines. "We want it, we'll take it, and then we will do what we want with it."

I think they may produce a good movie - a good mystery. A mystery movie where the main character is a kind of prim amateur detective. Who happens to be named Miss Marple.

That does not make it a Miss Marple movie,

The heads of Disney screwed it up again. No matter how good of a movie this is, in an objective way, it is an insult to Agatha Christie and to Miss Marple, and to seniors everywhere.

The whole point of Miss Marple is that she was an elderly lady - an innocent-looking, fluffy, harmless "old puss" who managed to catch murderers with her wisdom and her "fine sense of evil."  She was elderly enough, and with enough infirmity, to not be allowed to work in her garden. Yet, she could track down cold-blooded killers with a ruthlessness that was shocking.

"If anybody had been there to observe the gentle-looking elderly lady who stood meditatively on the loggia outside her bungalow, they would have thought she had nothing more on her mind than deliberations on how to her arrange her time that day..." (From A Caribbean Mystery)

Miss Marple was not afraid to call evil, "evil". She was described as "fluffy", "harmless", "scattered", "unimportant", "far too old to take care of herself", and "old". So part of her charm lies in her age, in her state of life.

To have her "updated" to a much younger woman is to lose who Miss Marple it. And sadly, many people who go to see this movie will not have ever read one of Christie's wonderful Miss Marple books. Nor will they read them after viewing the movie.

Sadness.