Oh Vance, you cruel, cruel man.
No, it's not like that. It wasn't scolding him, yelling at him, or getting on his case.
I merely told him that he had jumped the gun on something and messed up my attempt to save it as a surprise.
Poor kid, he was just trying to watch some Disney+ because the power had dwindled down on his device and I told him he needed to let it charge for a while. Hey, I'm not magician, I cannot instantly zap a battery back to its full life.
I didn't notice what he was watching until I walked through the room almost an hour in, at which point it looked familiar -- and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.
It was the new Pixar film, Luca.
"Oh no no no no no!" I said, realizing a grave error in the natural order of events.
See, we're going out of town next week, back to Nagambie, where my wife and I went for her birthday back in February. We both have to work, but we need a change of scenery after our recent lockdowns, so we'll just work remotely from a different place. We were supposed to actually go down to the Mornington Peninsula to stay at a friend's beach house while they were out of town -- even though it's not beach weather -- but they couldn't make their own trip interstate as a result of borders still being closed between states as there are more COVID outbreaks around the country. The falling dominoes left them in their own beach house for the first week of school holidays and us out of luck.
Enter Nagambie, where we will try to make it as much like a holiday as we can while we still both working. My wife works three days a week (Tuesday through Thursday) for her current job, then does freelance work on Mondays and Fridays, which means she'll have some flexibility to entertain the kids on those days, while I'll take Wednesday off and entertain them that day. I guess Tuesday and Thursday it'll be screens, screens and more screens for them. They'll be so disappointed.
But enough of our holiday logistics.
We like to incorporate a number of fun things into these trips out of town, and on this trip I'd planned to bring along our projector and have a family viewing of Pixar's latest. You may recall that we did a similar thing when Soul came out on a trip out of town over Christmas.
My younger son loved that experience, which was scheduled for the night of his birthday, making it all the more special. And making this prospective projector viewing of Luca all the more special by association.
So when I told him I'd planned to have us watch it as a family out of town next week, he started crying.
Now, you might think I'm an unreliable narrator here, making myself look better than I actually was. You might think my tone of voice was all scoldy or annoyed, like he should have known better.
In truth, that's not the case. He shouldn't have known better. We've never even talked about Luca, even though Disney+ is advertising it very prominently on the landing page for the obvious reason of its newness. Part of keeping a good surprise is not talking about the thing in question too much before you launch the surprise.
But the risk of that is that your younger son decides to watch the movie on his own while he's waiting for his device to charge back up so he can keep playing Brawl Stars.
So I swear, the only tone in my voice was disappointment at my own failure to properly prevent this from happening. But that was enough.
He started crying and he was basically inconsolable for the next 15 minutes. My immediate attempts to console him were so strenuous that they drew my wife out of the bedroom where she was enjoying her morning tea. Neither of us could console him, as much as we tried, and even an hour later he was still looking miserable.
He stopped watching Luca and will finish the final 30 minutes when we all watch it together in a couple days. But it's a sign of how much he's enjoyed these movie-related surprises that he mourned this like he'd mourn the loss of a favorite toy. The only thing lost here was the ephemeral experience of consuming a possibly beloved new movie for the first time together. But that was enough.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that this may be the real cinephile among my children. The older one is the one I've worked on harder, just because he was the first one who became a sentient creature capable of consuming movies, and just because, sad as it is to admit, the older child tends to get more of your attention on any area where you are trying to indoctrinate them. He's also the one who always tells me that the latest movie we've seen is his favorite of all time.
But the older one does not gravitate toward the experience of watching movies like the younger one does. He would never fire up a movie during his free time, which the younger one does do, as evidenced by the current example. The younger one might be the one following in his old man's footsteps, who sees a couple free hours as the perfect chance to add a new movie to your list.
And like him, I'd probably be a bit crushed too if I'd inadvertently spoiled a movie-related surprise someone had curated for me.
Alas, I hear Luca is not so great. So maybe it wasn't even the right movie to have scheduled for this sort of surprise.
And you know what? I was actually going to sneak in an early viewing of the movie, even if he didn't.
I need to watch new movies as close to their release date as possible for the purpose of reviewing them for ReelGood. So I actually tried to get Luca on the books last weekend, just after it had been released, and long before any idea of watching it on our holiday occurred to me.
My wife put the kibosh on this proposed Sunday night viewing due to the fact that we already had a busy Sunday afternoon hosting a play date for my older son. I was nursing a sore foot, so I thought there was a chance she'd take both of our kids out, plus my older son's friend, for a couple hours in the afternoon. She left the younger one back with me, as I should have expected, but if she hadn't, I was going to throw on Luca in order to write up my review -- not telling anyone I'd already watched it when we eventually watched it as a family.
If I'd shared this with my son yesterday, that I tried to watch it before he even did, it might have saved a few tears.
But then my wife would have known that I had schemed to spoil our family viewing, and I can't have that.
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