"I’m going to the movies with my Daddy," my daughter tells everyone.
Not Mommy, Daddy.
It has almost become a tradition in our home that my two kids go to the movies with their father (who’s also a filmmaker) or with their grandfather who’s a big movie lover. Those two men don’t discriminate and they love monitos as much as the next art house flick.
I, on the other hand, have no interest in watching these films whatsoever and very much appreciate their Dad’s gesture of taking them without me because that translates into two hours for me. I seldom get two hours to myself during a weekend–and that is definitely a cause for celebration.
So I miss the movies when they come out, but I usually see them later on, since my kids, like all the other kids in the world, have this insane habit of watching the same movie over and over a million times.
The last one I saw with them was Despicable Me–oh my god, what an amazing film. I loved it. Then a couple of days after, Juliana gets home from school and runs towards me all excited with her spelling quiz. She hands it to me with a huge and proud smile on her face:
"Look Mom, I got an 8!"
The previous night we had gone through the list of 10 words she gets each week and we made sure she had the spelling down for all 10 of them. I said:
"But Juliana what happened with the remaining two words? You knew these… you spelled them for me…"
Suddenly her smile disappeared and she asked me,
"But 8 out of 10 is good, no?"
F*ck, I thought. Despicable me. Here I am helping this sweet 6-year-old turn into the biggest villain of all time, like in the movie.
Not only that–I used to get very poor grades in school, my brother was the 10 and I was the 6 or 7. My parents were always proud of us both and never made me feel bad unless I had a 5.
So, I immediately changed gears and I wondered how many times before have I put my daughter down. I promised myself to watch it, before Juliana goes ahead and tries to steal the moon.
(If you don’t get the ending, watch the movie.)
Have you ever caught yourself putting your kids down? How did you fix it?
Image via Amazon
