Move and Movie

Move:

I have not been thinking about GF diet or the GF lifestyle recently. My family is going through a lot of stress and this stress takes up most my available energy. My husband has two possible jobs he is juggling and I have one possible job. To clarify, when I say possible I mean we are in the process of second or third interviews – there are no offers yet.

Most of our stress originates from where my husband (aka “the man”) will get a job and how will we manage to move where ever that job is. Yuck. Just thinking about a huge move is exhausting. I am pretending we are not potentially moving from the SF bay area to South Dakota. I find that if I pretend the move is not happening then I can stay sane while we wait to see what fate has to offer us.

Moving with a family is just stressful. First of all, school starts in a couple weeks so no matter what we will move mid school year. I want to make sure when we move we place the kids in the school they will stay in once we are living in South Dakota to keep from moving them around to much. Two, I feel truly intimidated by finding a neighborhood and school while living in SF. It is too expensive to fly both of us out there right now just to peruse. So I will be relying on the pictures the man takes and on online resources. Three, our home is not ready to sell yet and getting the funds and time to fix it is impractical. In fact the worst part of the moving scenario is trying to figure out what the heck we do with the house we have! I shudder to think how to handle that.

Then again this all might be a non-existent worry. The man might not get an offer in South Dakota. Of course if he does then we get a month to figure all this crap out. Yuck, head ache.

Movie:

Recently I took my girls to the movies to see Ramona and Beezus. This was great because, daughter number one went into it – by it I mean the movie theater. Daughter number one does not really like the theater. She doesn’t like how it gets dark or the loudness of the movie and she really does not like not knowing what is going to happen next in the movie. However, we have really progressed from the little girl who would not even enter the theater to the little girl who will timidly enter it when she knows what the movie is about, is given yummy treats and is reassured we can leave if she doesn’t like the movie.

This was a great movie for us, because our family can relate a lot to the characters and their struggles.

We have been reading the Ramona books at home and I found the movie was fairly true to the books. The books are about two sisters who have a typical sibling relationship with rivalry. It shows each child make personal growth as they both work to find the space they need as individuals and learn to accept each other flaws. I think daughter number one can relate to the Beezus, the older sister in the movie, who is a bit of a stormy character with a lot of opinions and is always coming to terms with her emotions. While Ramona reminds me of all the reasons I worry about my youngest in kindergarten. I am not sure my younger daughter is at the age in which she can appreciate a longer book without many pictures – which is a shame, because she should sympathize with everything Ramona is going through! Beverly Clearly does an amazing job depicting the relationships in the family and the psychology of the two children as they navigate their different adventures.

I especially like reading this series to my own kids because the family in the book is struggling with the same sort of money issues. I know that our kids notice what is happening and they talk about our job hunt in the blunt way children do. Things like offering us the change they find in the house to make ends meet. Sweet and somewhat short sided. In fact in the movie daughter number one said, quite loudly in the theater, “they are looking for a job like you and daddy”. I felt a little conspicuous, but then it occurred to me that the reason I like the kids seeing the movie is I want them to know that isn’t weird or embarrassing it is just another stage in life AND most importantly we will get through it as a family. The movie definitely shows that lots of families struggle with things like jobs. Ramona and Beezus the movie also broached the topic that families move sometimes to follow a job – not sure if this happens later in the books. Of course this movie ended with a “happy” no-one-has-to-move-to-a-new-state ending; however, it makes the concept something I feel we could talk about now.

Actually what I didn’t expect in the movie – maybe because we haven’t read the later books in the series yet – is that Picky-Picky, the family cat, dies. I did not realize how hard the kids took that. In the theater they were upset a little. On the way home it turned into a full melt down for my youngest. The death of Picky-Picky led to a couple days of discussing heaven and pet loss, as well as, lots of reassuring my kids that our pets are all young and have a lot of time left in them. In some ways the death of the family pet might have been a blessing. The movie really dramatized the children potentially having to move, it built a lot of anxiety around this and I think the loss of the cat distracted my kids from getting too caught up in that. So thank you Picky-Picky for kicking the literary bucket.