Raeli is five today. I’ve been thinking of her as a nearly-five-year-old for a while now, so this shouldn’t be a shock. The last five years have been the best of my life. Being a mum is completely awesome, and she really is one of my favourite people in the world. She’s spent the last several days making a book (a real stapled book!) with the story of Snow White and the Wicked Queen (obviously the two important characters in the story) written out laboriously, with spelling help from me, plus illustrations and activity pages. She now tells stories that go on forever. She’s smart, creative and imaginative. She also argues like a bitch lawyer from hell and never, ever forgets a piece of information that might possibly be useful to her.

I love my girl.

And I say this despite the fact that, today, with no warnings or opportunity to brace myself, I had to sit through Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Squeakquel. Words cannot describe how appalling this movie was.  godieva sat together in mutual horror as our children giggled and enjoyed themselves through the entire thing.

It’s not just that it’s a movie about singing chipmunks. I could live with that. It’s just – such an appalling movie. The narrative makes no sense for the first half. The second half is mildly better only because there are more distracting action sequences. But oh. The sexual politics. Composing a mental blog entry about the hideous sexual politics of this movie was all that got me through it. But I will not inflict this on you. Not unless I can’t get it out of my head any other way.

We were attempting, by the way, to see the Princess and the Frog. Which Raeli and I have been looking forward to for six months, and which was unexpectedly taken off the Village Cinema schedules today. Apparently Thursday is the day that they change these things. We did not know this, and nor did the many other disappointed little girls who were turned away from the cinema today. It was my daughter’s birthday treat. There was a wobbly lip and the possibility of explodey tears, on her birthday. Of course we had to suck it up and buy tickets to the only children’s film currently on offer for the remainder of the children’s holidays.

I can’t scrub the chipmunk horror out of my mind. Girl chipmunks doing ‘Single Ladies’ and ‘Hot and Cold’ and being criticised for not being skinny enough. CHIPMUNKS.

Anyway, all is not lost. There is hopefully still a 10am screening of The Princess and the Frog we can go to this week. She’ll still get there.

The rest of the movie experience wasn’t great either – I had to take a pram in, because having Jemima in a front pouch makes it so hard to feed her, and the place is entirely inaccessible. Stairs everywhere. There was a weird slope built into the floor by the back rows which meant basically that the two rows you can put a pram next to without blocking the aisle for everyone else are impossible to park a pram on. I don’t know how people in wheelchairs cope if they don’t want to sit in front of the front row – I guess they don’t go to the cinema in Hobart.

This, incidentally, is the only cinema in the city.

Honestly, if it wasn’t for the nice girl who went to look for Raeli’s hat after we trudged back to look for it, I would have written off Village Cinemas entirely today.

But yes. The important thing is that she had a lovely birthday. Right?

Tags: birthdays, family, raeli, watching