Why earplugs are a good thing, even for fun.

Chispa and Changa have been begging to go see the Princess and the Frog. This wouldn't be remarkable to most families, but we have never taken either one to an actual movie in the theater. Why? Chiefly because Chispa has always been seriously noise averse. Noise averse to the point that she would freeze in noisy locations, let alone a deafening movie experience. A Pump it Up birthday party last year took her 30 minutes to be able to walk through the door. (the music was admittedly offensively blasting, on top of the noise). That said, Princess and the Frog seemed like a pretty tame option, so bravely I Fandago'd the tickets last night.



Sidebar, Fandango rocks. That was so worth the $4 total in service fees for 4 tickets. We avoided the two blocks long line to get in and walked past it! By going to a first show, it was pretty cheap too, and being that it was MLK day, Mr. H was able to come to. So we figured, if anyone flipped out, we had a good adult-kid ratio. Oh, and I stopped at CVS and bought a pack of earplugs.

I offered earplugs to both girls, and to myself, and then everyone looked pretty happy. One fell out for Chispa, which was no good, but I had a bag of the earplugs, so we replaced it. Changa ended up on Mr. H's lap, Chispa was a little concerned during some of the scary sections, but she did great. By the end, both were antsy, apparently 1.5 hours maxes out our progeny's seated potential. In any case, nobody ran screaming from the theater, nobody was cowering and sobbing. Everyone actually had fun. While I slept (poorly) last night, I'd envisioned all of the former scenarios, so I'm happy we managed fun for everyone.

Not to harp on this, but musicians use ear plugs these days. I brought earplugs for myself to Avatar too. I could hear everything just about right in both movies. Really, do they HAVE to make movies that deafening?

I think we can hit movies with the girls again, with our earplug pack in hand, of course!