favorite thing ... sunday

I meant to write this post on Friday night but well, Charlie and I rented a movie.

(This is a picture from the day I thought it would be a good idea to take two-year-old triplets to the movies by myself while I was eight-months pregnant and needed to use the restroom every 10 minutes. I often refer to this day as the most asinine day of my entire life.)

I would have written this post on Saturday night, but I settled down on the couch with my husband and we watched another movie. Because there are very few things that I enjoy more, in this entire world, then watching a good movie with my beloved while sharing a bowl of popcorn.

Charlie and I are huge movie buffs.

Before we had children, we watched a movie at least three nights a week. We watched movies every weekend. We went out to movies. We rented movies. We watched the Academy Awards with a notepad and pencil in hand so we could write down all the movies that we needed to see.

Once we had children, we took a movie hiatus. We would rent a movie once in a blue moon and the last time we went to the theater together was when Henry was a newborn.

But we missed the anticipation of sitting down for a show with a big bowl of popcorn. We missed watching movies that are so good ... so thought provoking ... they would keep us talking about plots for days. We missed watching movies that were so funny, we would laugh until our sides hurt and incorporate random quotes in to our everyday vernacular.

"Dad is great. He gives us chocolate cake!"

(where's that from?)

For a host of reasons, Charlie and I don't go out on date nights too frequently.

There's the finding a competent babysitting dilemma, the sheer exhaustion we usually feel after a full day dilemma, and the cost of a "fun" night out dilemma. But the number one reason we don't go out very often is because we're a bunch of losers homebodies that would much prefer to spend an evening at the house dilemma.

However. Ever since we upgraded our home theater system at Christmas, we've been watching more movies than we have for the past five years. Still, the whole process of procuring movies was a real chore.

Usually, by the time we realized that we wanted to watch a movie - the kids were all in bed - and it would take far more energy than either one of us possessed to drive down to the video store, peruse the aisles, pick out something that we hoped was worthy of our time, drive home again, and then watch a movie that we would most likely fall asleep midway through.

So this past week, we joined Netflix.

We might be among the last people in the country to have joined this online video rental program, but in the off chance we're not, we are offering up a contest where you could win a one-year subscription to Netflix in exchange for a $1.00 donation to the Tuesday Fiona Whitt Foundation.

I wrote about Tuesday last week before the hellstorm virus hit and before I found out that our beloved Jimbo has pancreatic cancer. If you missed the post, Tuesday is the beautiful two-year-old daughter of Jessica Kate and Charley who lost her battle to neuroblastoma this past January. Every time I read her mother's blog, it feels like my heart has been ripped out of my chest.

So why do I read her blog?

Because I can't look away.

Cancer is bad. I hate it.

Netflix is good. I love it.

Donating money for research that will one day rid the world of cancer is even better. Because no child should ever have to wear a shirt that says this:

For every $1.00 that you donate to the Tuesday Foundation, your name will be entered in to the raffle to win a one-year-subscription to Netflix. Since I'm late joining the party - this particular contest will end on Saturday, May 16.

Click this link and it will take you directly to the fundraiser.



In case you were wondering, this is a $108.00 value.

If you want to be a part of this contest - please be sure to leave your NAME and the amount of your donation on THIS post. For example: "Enter me to win! I want to be your Netflix Movie Buddy!! I'm Jen and my donation amount is $10.00!!"

I'm so excited about our new subscription. How it works is you pick all the movies you would like to watch and put those in to your "queue". From there, Netflix will send you the first movie in queue. Once you watch the movie and return it in a pre-paid envelope, they will send you the next movie you have in queue. There are no late fees. You can have 1 DVD out at a time, and you can exchange them as often as you want.

And, if you win this raffle, you can be our Netflix friend and we can trade comments on the movies that we've watched and enjoy. Charlie is heading up the queue and trust me when I say Charlie has an awesome ability for selecting good movies. Much like he has an awesome ability to do pretty much anything.

Exhibit 1. Check out the cake he made me for Mother's Day.

My husband baked us a chocolate cake.

And tomorrow, we might eat it for breakfast.