Why We Got Up Early to Go to the Movies

The alarm went off at 7:30am.  Pretty early for our household.  Showers, clothes, hair brushes, rubber bands (the hair kind), cereal, milk, shoes, socks, house keys, car keys, hats, gloves, bag-o-baby-stuff for Lily, stroller, coats, movie tickets. 

Photo by Corbis

Movie tickets?  Yes.  Movie tickets.  Today our family was waking up early to go to the movies.  Specifically, an opening day screening of Percy Jackson and the Olympians - The Lightening Thief.  This was serious business.  We were not messing around. 

Earlier in the year we were downtown and saw a billboard for said movie.  The kids went bonkers.  We stopped right there and then, took photos with the billboard in the background.  The countdown was on!  “When is President’s Day Weekend?” they asked.  “Sometime in February,” we responded.  We’d tuck that away for later.  For now it was hot, we were hungry and it was time to get back to our air conditioned car and drive home.

Well, summer turned into fall, fall turned into winter, and winter turned into President’s Day weekend.  By this time our children had finished reading the whole Percy Jackson series.  (I’d heard the first 100 pages or so read aloud on a car trip.) They’d seen all the movie trailers.  They knew all the stars.  Our two oldest had started a pod cast comparing the trailer to book.  The only question that remained was, “When can we see it?”  I was ambivalent.

Flying

So here's the song I wrote in the Albuquerque Airport:

Flying

I recorded it in my living room a few nights later after I'd gotten back to NYC. It was late. Traffic was quiet outside, Emily was reading a magazine and the kids were asleep.