Monsters, Inc with My Monster

When we started to wean Tommy off his seizure medication (so far, so good--crazy to think that he's on the same dosage now that he was at 15 months old), he stopped sleeping at night. He's never been a good sleeper, but he usually makes it to some point between 4:30 and 5:30 before he gets up. However, after we cut back on his medicine dosage, he started to get out of bed at 1 or 2 every single night. A week of this and we were exhausted, because getting out of bed at 1 or 2 didn't mean that he slept later in the morning. No, he was up just as early. And we both work full-time, so it's not like we were getting to ease into the day, anyway.
One morning out of desperation, I promised Tommy that if he stayed in his bed every night for a week, I would take him to see Monsters, Inc in the theatre. It's been his favorite DVD lately. I didn't think it would work, but somehow, it did. He made it through every single night for a week. If you count 5AM making it through the night which around these parts, we do. Now, when Luke was Tommy's age, I'd already taken him to a movie, but Luke was a different kid. I knew he would sit still through the whole movie, but Tommy can't sit still on our couch for an hour, so I knew it would be a miracle if we made it through the entire movie, but a promise is a promise.

So away we went to the movies. The whole way there, I talked about how you have to behave at the movies. I also talked about how we could get popcorn and a slushie, so that was our first order of business.

When we walked in, the theatre was completely empty (intentionally, I took us to the earliest show, hoping it wouldn't be very busy) and Tommy said, "Where are all the people?!" I told him he could sit wherever he wanted. He walked up a few rows, then decided he was happy with a seat right off the aisle. I figured this was good in case we had to make a quick exit.

I explained to him that because this movie was in 3D, we had to wear these special glasses to see the movie. He didn't want to take his off.

Until 30 minutes into the movie when he turned to me and told me that he could see just fine without them and no longer wished to wear them. I guess he didn't quite understand the concept of 3D.

He did pretty well, all things considered. Luckily, there were only about ten other people there. My only annoyance was that despite it being an empty theatre, a guy and his 9 or 10 year old son sat RIGHT behind us, which made me feel like when Tommy was rocking back and forth in his chair or flipping the arm rest up and down, I had to stop him. This in turn made Tommy more antsy, whereas if I could've just let him do it, had the guy sat anywhere else in the empty theatre, he would've continued to watch the movie while flipping his arm rest up and down and hadn't bothered anyone. Of course, each time I told him to leave his arm rest up and down, he reacted loudly because he didn't understand why it was so bad. Luckily, there was another little boy there who totally hadn't mastered his inside voice yet, either, so Tommy wasn't the loudest one. But, we made it through the whole movie with very little incidents, except for the one time that Tommy decided he wanted to sit in the row in front of us and tried to climb over the seats. I quickly squashed that one. Since he did a much better job than I thought, I let him play the hook game after the movie.

He didn't quite get the whole play til you win thing and thought he won this green puppy dog all of his own skills. I let him think that. He's been sleeping with it ever since.

Then we got a Happy Meal, after some disappointment in which I explained that the Dairy Queen next door was closed for the season (I know, buddy... I wanted ice cream, too) and on the way home, we got stopped by a train! He asked me to roll down his window so he could listen to the train go by.

All in all, I would say he had a great day. So did I.