For the last six nights, we have watched the extended version of the Lord of the Rings movies. One part per night, six nights. Watching movies with small children takes a lot of patience. But it also makes for some good conversation.
The first thing one might think is, "Those movies are SCARY! How can your little ones watch them?" Well, either my kids have a higher tolerance for scary characters or they just learn early on that the Orks are just regular people playing dress up-from me. Mark says I ruin the magic of the story when I tell them about people pretending to be characters in the story and I might as well tell them all there is no such thing as Santa while I'm at it. But he sleeps with earplugs and I'm the one that gets up with them at night. The first time they see Gollum as a 2 or 3 year old, they usually say something cute like, "Is that a monkey?" And most of the time, the youngest of the crew (Daniel and Lula) fall asleep as soon as the movie starts.
The middle kids, like Fiona and Evie, will giggle when Gollum talks to himself or when Gimli says something funny and they will love the elves' outfits. They will ask questions that have easy answers. Or questions like, "If Sam is just a regular person pretending to be a hobbit, is he really married to that girl he kisses at the end? No? Then why is he kissing someone he isn't married to? How much did they pay him to do that?"
Ian and Shane can (hopefully) appreciate the story on a deeper level. If they ever stop talking about non-movie related things during the movie. Last night, Shane lost a tooth right at the end. He got so worked up about it we had to threaten to send everyone to bed early. We sneaked a peek at him later and he was petting his tooth and calling it his precious...
...I dug into the annals of Downen history and discovered that Fiona was six days late. This whole time I thought she was only three days late. So it looks like I'm in for a longer haul than I thought...
