Minions

So much has happened with the boys in the last two months! They are growing up so fast!!! If you know us well you’ve probably heard us say that the boy’s don’t watch movies. While TV exposure should certainly be limited, it is hard to argue against having a 30 – 60 minutes of down time while your children are tied up in the tube. The boys have never really had much interest in TV or videos so we had never really had that opportunity… until recently that is.

A couple of months ago the best we could get was maybe 20 – 30 minutes of Zach and 10 minutes of Adam watching an episode of Calliou. After that it was time to go outside. GiGi tried helping us out by picking up a Mini Movie DVD that had a few short movies from Despicable Me, a few from The Lorax, and one from Hop. They were no more than five minutes a piece and she thought they might be short enough to grab some attention for a bit. We put it on and flipped through a few of the movies. The boys looked at it but didn’t really seem to care too much so we put it away. I can’t remember what happened next but we ended up putting it in a few weeks later and it was a totally different story.

All of the sudden the boys were obsessed with Minions. “I wanna watch the Minions”, they cried, as we cleared the stuffed animals off of their Elmo couch and dragged it to the middle of the living room carpet. They skittered over and sat down. We gave them each a bowl of goldfish and they watched all three Minion movies as if they were in their own private theater. Then they watched them again. By the end of it Sally and I had a chance to eat dinner without little monsters crawling all over us. It. Was. Amazing.

Zachary has become particularly obsessed with them, asking to watch a movie when he gets up in the morning, when we come home from school in the evening, and before he goes to bed at night. He’s even chosen a movie over going outside. Adam certainly enjoys them but will choose outside time over a movie. We’ve actually had situations where Zach wants to watch a movie and Adam doesn’t so we just split up. One of us can get some stuff done in the house with Zach and the other one can go outside with Adam. It’s always much easier to deal with them one-on-one because there is no one else there to agitate them. We’ve since expanded our movie theater to include the three Lorax (or “Orlax” as Zachary calls them) movies as well as a few Magic School Bus episodes. We aren’t planning to turn the boys into couch potatoes but we are thankful that there is just one more thing that can keep their attention. With winter fast approaching we need all the help we can get.