January was pretty uneventful once the kids got back in school.
But we did have some important things.
FIRST
Hazel entered the young women program at church! I went with her and Natalie to the stake young women new beginnings activity, which I spent most of looking for Natalie around the building and the temple grounds because she went out soon after it started.
We have a very small group of young women that up to this point haven’t really interacted with each other and don’t really know each other, which is evident by how they posed for the pictures, but I have an optimistic vision of a tight-knit group sometime in the future.
ALSO
We got all of our TIE cards! (TEE-yeh, Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero, Foreigner Identity Card)
What a relief. Now we can travel outside of Spain and get back in without any problems, hopefully.
We had pizza to celebrate.
ALSO
The kids’ elementary school hosts parents for lunch with their child’s grade level once a year. We’ve already been with Grace to lunch, and this month we got to go with Tyrus. The food has been pretty good! Both times they’ve served delicious soup, salad, bread, and yogurt. They put us at a table with another English-speaking boy in Tyrus’s class from Finland. We realized later that we should’ve had the boys sit next to each other in the middle, but as it was they were on the ends with parents in between so they didn’t talk. But it was nice sitting with Tyrus, and we got to know the parents a little. They both work remotely and moved to Spain for the warmer climate.
ALSO
We went to the movies. Many movies in theaters are from the US, like Aquaman that recently came out here. But our criteria was to see a movie originally in Spanish, and of course a kid-friendly one, which left us with one choice, a Spanish one called Arca de Noe, Noah’s Ark. Migration was also in theaters, but again, the whole originally-in-Spanish idea.
I expected it to be bad but was hopeful that it would exceed my expectations.
It was a real struggle to get the kids to go out the door, but we were determined to see this one through and not back down, because we don’t want to be sitting around all the time at home; we want to experience the way things are in Spain, including the movies. To persuade them I tried referring to our family mission statement, which includes We love to make memories together–so even if it’s a bad movie, we’re still making this memory together!
In the end it was the bribe of movie treats that won them over.
Tyrus and Grace liked it, but it definitely wasn’t a Pixar-style show including humor and story that can be appreciated by all ages. For me it was practically torture and I was tempted to have us just leave, and afterwards Jacob told me he thought the same thing, but I kept thinking, no we have to see it through, so that next time we’re going through a terribly boring experience, or our kids are in a boring class at school or something, we could say, Hey, if you sat through Noah’s Ark, you can make it through this.
The animation was subpar, the dialogue was painful, and the plot was incredibly random–
A pair of male mice friends who are talented musicians want to get on the ark together but the man in charge is like, No, only one male and one female. So one mouse gets left behind, but then teams up with a bunch of bugs who make a little boat and sing in circles in it and eventually get onto the ark. So at first I thought this was going to be an LGBTQ+ themed movie, which I’m fine with but it would just open up opportunities for some conversations with our kids, but then it turned to a different direction.
Then inside the ark, there is a power hierarchy, with the lions, gorillas, and bears bullying everyone else and stealing all the food. Finally someone decides to stand up to them on some issue, and they get to arguing, and then everyone turns to the wise old goat who everyone respects and sings a song about, who says, I know how to resolve this problem. We will have a talent show! And whoever wins gets their way.
So the last half of the movie is about all the animals (and Noah’s granddaughter, who can speak to the animals) preparing for the talent show, with the lion trying to coerce the mice into singing for him, which the mouse does, but during the actual show the mouse sings all sorts of wonky things to make the lion look bad. And the lion loses.
At some point there’s a leak in the boat, but they fix it. And they make it to land. The end.
Would I ever recommend this movie to anyone? Absolutely not. Am I glad that we went? Yes. Yes I am.
Did the kids want to be in a picture with the movie poster? No. No they did not.
