We also saw Meet the Robinsons.

We had long promised the kids that we would take them to see Meet the Robinsons on the very first day. We looked at a few of the reviews and were not so sure we wanted to do it.

Plot: This one is going to be tough to sketch, so I'm going to have to do it very, very vaguely, because there are lots of "OH!" moments in this movie. Basically, there's this kid named Lewis who can invent things. He's an orphan, abandoned at an orphanage as a baby. He's had 124 adoption interviews and never been adopted. He decides he wants to find his birth mother and starts inventing a "Memory Scanner" so he can delve into his memory and see what she looks like (it's not clear how seeing what his mom looks like is going to help him find her, but hey - this is a kid's movie). It just so happens that a big company called Inventco is going to give the winner of the elementary school science fair an internship with their company, so Lewis plans to demonstrate his Memory Scanner there for the first time. The only problem with this is that a man has come back in time to foil his plan and ruin his life. And a boy named Wilbur Robinson has come back to stop that man. Lewis ends up going into the future with Wilbur and meeting Wilbur's crazy family, which was, to me, the best part of the movie. Because it's Disney, it all works out fine in the end (and had the whole theater crying happy tears for Lewis), but I'm not going to tell you HOW. It would spoil it.

The reviews said that there were seven screenwriters for this movie, and that you could really tell. Yes, it's frenetic, but it's supposed to be. And Mike and I boiled it down to this as we walked out of the theater:

This is a movie for geeks. If you are now, or have ever been, a geek, you will LOVE this movie.

Because we live in a small Texas town, there weren't too many geeks in attendance at our showing, and hence, a lot of really confused people walking out of the theater. We weren't at all confused. Maddy and Major BOTH just LOVED it, and Major was able to repeat back to us all the main plot points. It hit on all the right levels.

On a scale of Clifford the Big Red Dog: The Movie to Narnia, it's right up next to Narnia. It might even become the new benchmark. I laughed SO HARD at this movie, because I'm a total geek.

We saw The Last Mimzy.

So, we've gone to the movies quite a bit recently (or, at least, quite a bit for US), and so I thought I'd tell you about the two movies we've seen these last two weekends.

Last weekend, we went to see The Last Mimzy. Plot: A five-year-old girl and her older brother (I'd guess he was probably about 9?) find a mysterious box on the beach. Inside the box are some glowing things that intrigue the brother, and a stuffed rabbit that intrigues the sister. The longer they keep the mysterious stuff, the more amazing the kids become. They can draw things they've never drawn before, and the little girl becomes telekinetic, etc. The parents start to get really freaked out (the mom MUCH more than the dad - I wanted to SHAKE the mom, but I hate Joely Richardson anyway.) and they enlist the help of the boy's science teacher (Rainn Wilson) and his girlfriend who reminds me of Idina Menzel but isn't. The whole plot turns when one night the boy is messing with some of the mysterious toys and he sets off a nationwide blackout. The Dept of Homeland Security (headed up by Michael Clarke Duncan) gets involved and suddenly we get to find out exactly what this is all about.

Really, this is a movie for older kids. Maddy got it and she liked it (because, really, there was a five-year-old girl with a stuffed animal!), but Major was totally in it for the glitzy special effects. For the record, there is one scene where the Dept of Homeland Security storms their house, but I don't remember them having guns or anything, and it wasn't NEARLY as terrifying as the men in the white suits in ET.

All in all, it was cute, but not the best movie ever. Parts of it were completely unbelievable. On a scale of Clifford the Big Red Dog: The Movie to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I'd probably give it a Home on the Range. Not my favorite, but not painful to watch, either. We'll probably end up buying it out of the $5.50 bin at Wal*Mart when it gets there.

The Actual 100 Books List of 2007

Here are the books I've actually read so far this year, in my quest to read 100 books. (It's actually really doable, you just have to read at least 8 books a month.)

December 2006
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Naked Republicans by Shelley Lynch
A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
My Secret by Frank Warren
The Last Queen by C.W. Gortner

January 2007
One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus
Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs
Dance Upon the Air by Nora Roberts
Heaven and Earth by Nora Roberts
Face the Fire by Nora Roberts
Smitten by Janet Evanovich
Full Bloom by Janet Evanovich
A Loving Scoundrel by Johanna Lindsey

February 2007
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
The Pursuit by Johanna Lindsey
Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich
Bittersweet by Nevada Barr
The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank
Blue Dahlia by Nora Roberts
Elvis and Me by Priscilla Beaulieu Presley

March 2007
The President’s Daughter by Barbara Chase-Riboud
All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve
Light on Snow by Anita Shreve
A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
Red Lily by Nora Roberts

Hey, I never claimed they were all works of literary genius.

Currently reading: High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Next up: About a Boy by Nick Hornby and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

I stole this from Christy.

It's a list of 100 books. You bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you want to read and leave the ones you're not interested in plain.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) - I totally have this book and have never cracked it.
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier) - This is actually on my bedside table, waiting for me to finish my Nick Hornby binge.
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

So, that's 45 from that list that I've read, and I want to read 22 more. Not bad.

My kids are really awesome.

There are just some things I want to remember about my kids.

*******
Maddy calls scissors "zizzors."
*******
Major calls Thomas the Tank Engine "Thomas the Wank Engine."
*******
A few weeks ago, in the car, my son looked at my daughter and said "I. Am going to GET YOU. I am going to wait until you're in your room and I'm going to GET YOU."

Alarmed, Maddy said, "What?!"

And Major replied, "Oh yeah. I'm going to get you."
*******

Celebrating the Big 0-3
A couple of weeks ago, we had Major's birthday party at the local Zoo. He had a few little friends from school come along. The Zoo gave him his own birthday train for just the participants in the party and he could not have been a happier little dude. Whenever someone would show up for the party, he would yell "IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!!!!!" with all the excitement of a child who had been waiting for his birthday for about four months - or since his sister's birthday. He got lots of wonderful presents and was just as absolutely thrilled as I had hoped he would be. It was a perfect party. He had a cupcake with birthday candles and we sang - it was the perfect 3rd birthday. It even had tigers.

Have You Terrified Your Three-Year-Old Today?
The next day, that Sunday, we took the children to the rodeo to ride rides and have fun. They rode the ponies, visited the petting zoo, took cowboy pictures and basically had a fantastic time. After all that, we went over so they could ride rides. They rode the carousel and a motorcycle ride and some other kiddie rides. THEN, they discovered a ride called "Ladybugs," which was a train with lots of little hills that went around in a circle and then stopped and went around that same circle backwards. It didn't look too fast or anything, and Major was tall enough to ride it. He and Maddy got on and off they went. As it went faster and faster, he looked more and more dismayed until he was full-on sobbing. Halfway through, the ride slowed down and then stopped in order to go backwards. I asked the operator if he could stop the ride so I could retrieve my hysterical boy.

He said: "Why? He ain't hurt."

I said: "You're right."

The ride carried on and then when it was over, Mike retrieved Major, who was sobbing so hard he could barely breathe.

I am a horrible mother.

I cuddled him, but he cried for nearly 20 minutes and kept saying "SO SCARED! IT WAS SO SCARY!"

It started raining right then, so we went home. I still feel terrible about it, though.
*******

I recently went on a trip. On Monday night, I was tucking Maddy into bed and she said "Mama, I missed you a really lot."

I've Read Some Things: Part 3 of 3

The other book I read this week was Anita Shreve's Light on Snow.

This one, I really, really liked. The ending was again, too quick, and the size of the print on the page really made me realize how short a book it was: it was almost like a novella to me. I'm OK with that, though, because it was on the clearance rack at Half-Price Books, and I got it for $1. You can't beat that. (Coincidentally, that's exactly how much I paid for A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, which I'm reading next, out of sheer and immutable curiosity.)

Without diving too deeply into it, Light on Snow is written in the voice of 12-year-old Nicky, who lost her mother and little sister in a car crash two years ago and was forced by her grieving father to move out in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire. One day, while taking a walk, father and daughter discover a baby, abandoned in the snow. They scoop the baby up and take her to the hospital. The paper writes a story about it and the baby's mother reads it and ends up visiting their home. She gets stuck there because of a snowstorm and it goes from there.

I thought it was one of the most genuine books I've read in awhile. Shreve captured the voice of a twelve-year-old very believably. She showed the struggle of the child to understand this horrible thing she has seen - and then the struggle to place the baby's mom in the whole puzzle, when she really just wants the baby's mom to love her and become part of the family.

There's an amazing optimism to the character of Nicky. She is the total opposite of her father - a person who, when something horrible happens to him in the loss of his wife and daughter, shuts himself off from everyone and everything. Nicky just wants to reach out and live, and it's an amazing dichotomy.

Anyway, highly recommended, that one.

Now, to talk about my kids...

I've Read Some Things: Part 2 of 3

So, next I read All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve.

While I think I liked the book (I'm strangely undecided about most of what I've read of Shreve's work), I struggled with the male voice of the protagonist because it's stereotypical. Then I start thinking about it and, for the time in which the book was set (1900s), it's understandable that the male voice would be stereotypical, and an effort to break free from that stereotype could be seen as not genuine to the time period. So it's a struggle for me, and I think I may be looking at it very narrowly.

The other problem I had was that it wrapped up SO quickly! All of these tangled webs, and the resolution was happened so fast! And while I sort of understood the impetus for the big throwdown at the end, it seems sort of a weak reason for all of the waves it caused, if that makes sense.

All in all, I think it was a solid book. Maybe I should read it again.

I've Read Some Things: Part 1 of 3

Sorry - this is going to be about a month's worth of posts in one single day. I've been slacking, but I've got a lot to talk about.

I'm attempting to read 100 new books from 1 December 2006 to 1 December 2007. I've read 25 so far, so I think I'm doing pretty well.

I read a book this month by Barbara Chase-Riboud called The President's Daughter.

The book was about Thomas Jefferson's natural daughter, Harriet Hemings, born to Sally Hemings in the late 1780s or early 1790s. Jefferson allowed her to run away at the age of 21, but she was never freed. He freed a couple of his sons upon his death, but not Sally Hemings (although the book alleges she didn't want to be free), and not his daughter. Nothing really is known about Harriet Hemings after she ran away, so Chase-Riboud created a life for her based on one of her brothers' "confessions" that was published in a newspaper long after Jefferson's death.

An interesting thing I learned in the book is that the Hemings children were only one-sixteenth black, so none of them had African-American features at all. Harriet Hemings was said to resemble Jefferson so strongly that visitors to the house were completely taken aback by it.

So, the hardest part of the story for me to understand was why this woman seemed to dwell so seriously on getting caught or getting outed or her secret. Her life went on for years and years after she ran away, but she was never able to just bury that within herself. I think that might speak more to my ability to self-deceive than any actual problems with the concept, though.

And then I finally figured it out - the reason she couldn't get it out of her head was because she was raised a slave. So black was not only a color to her, it was an entire state of being, because she was raised so completely differently from her white half-sister.

So, now I get it. And I recommend the book - it was very, very engrossing. I read it in two days.

And then I read two Anita Shreve books, which are upcoming in this space.