What Waffle Did in the Movie Theater

Newsletter 2019-11-24

I took all four of my kids to the movie theater. Clearly I’ve learned nothing in my nine years as a parent. This weekend was the big release of Frozen 2, and I convinced myself it was a special occasion worthy of setting aside common sense and every survival instinct in my body. But maybe it was more than that. It’s possible I just wanted an early preview of the songs my kids will sing again and again over the next four years until they finally drive me insane. Most of parenting is just masochism disguised as quality time.

I’ve only seen the first Frozen movie all the way through once or twice, but I’ve experienced the individual scenes hundreds of times as I walked through the living room, heard them played behind me on the van’s DVD player, or had them repeated back to me verbatim by my kids, who have the entire movie memorized. If children put as much effort into school work as they do into absorbing Disney movies, we’d be a nation of geniuses. Instead, we’re a nation of Elsa wannab…