The Hills Are Alive

Yes, it's Sound of Music time. My kids have never seen it, although they do know some of the songs, because we are, well, us. We planned on watching it Friday night, but Leanna has seen it and in true adolescent fashion she dismissed it s "a movie about a lady who comes to babysit a lot of kids". Um... that's a little bit of an oversimplification. Lizzy, four, may as well be Maria - "She is gentle, she is wild, she's a riddle, she's a child, she's a headache, she's an angel, she's a girl."

Abby is really enjoying it. Lizzy got bored just as Maria meets the von Trapp children and has gone into the other room to bang her toy ping-pong paddles together (she got whacked in the face with one earlier today) and draw endless pictures of her best friend Natalie on her Magna-doodle. And play in the sink, which she dearly loves to do but we don't usually allow unless we're trying to do something like watch a movie she's too young to appreciate.

"I bet her father would be really mad at her for kissing that boy in the thunderstorm," says Innocent Abby. Yeah, it's more that "that boy" is a Junior Nazi, really, but we haven't gotten that far into the movie yet. We shall see how it goes further in.

In the scene where Maria is singing a reprise of My Favorite Things and fingering the curtains in her room, Abby says, "Oooooooo - I know what she's thinking, because I've seen Enchanted." This blew me away, because of course the most famous example of curtains-to-dresses is from Gone With the Wind. I hadn't realized it was that prevalent a trope. So I looked it up. It is. And now she's dancing and singing along to Do Re Mi and thrilling that now she knows where this song comes from. And halfway through said song, she stopped dead and said, "Wait, she's Mary Poppins!?" She's always been good at this; she figured out that Mrs. Potts and Miss Price are done by the same actress years ago, so this was more of the same, but it always takes me aback.

I explained the basics of the Nazis (and why the Austrian von Trapps dislike them) in innocent-nine-year-old terms and she seemed to grok. The disc is from Netflix and started having some jerking and halting round about The Lonely Goatherd, which required a cleaning and scene selection to clear up. And it was only a temporary fix at that; we had to skip some more scenes. Netflix has been notified.

If there is anything else of note, I'll post it later. Time to put Lizzy to bed.