Yesterday afternoon a friend of mine (another single mom) texted me to see if I wanted to join her and her daughter to go see Kung Fu Panda. This was really not on my top lists of movies, but I did think Cameron would enjoy it, and I knew I would enjoy the time with another adult so I agreed. And I’m really glad that I did. Having the chance to visit with my friend was awesome, but surprisingly I actually enjoyed the movie too. It was very light and funny. I didn’t think to check my watch as I was leaving but it did seem kind of long for a children’s movie. I noticed a good bit before the movie was over that many kids in the theatre were starting to do more moving, whining, talking, etc.  Just more background noise I guess is what I noticed. Cameron never seemed to get bored though so it may have just been that a lot of younger kids were in the theatre. Even more I was really impressed as this was a small one screen theatre that I haven’t been to in years and they handed out movie posters after the movie to all the kids. There was also a local martial arts program there handing out flyers (Very smart business move I thought). 

If you’ve not seen the previews, this is the comedic story of a ninja team of animals, but all of a sudden a fat, out of shape, clumsy panda is deemed to be the key to peace in their village. There is resentment from the other team members, the master doesn’t even have faith in the panda (the panda doesn’t even have faith in the panda), but through teamwork and belief in yourself, Panda is able to defeat the bad guy, rally the team together, overcome parental expectations versus personal expectations, and save the village. Yes, it’s a traditional movie with a happy ending, but I never tire of these. There were several times this movie actually caught me by surprise and made me laugh out loud. It’s one that we’ll probably add to our dvd collection (We liked it that much).

After the movie, we went back to my friends house. She’ll be teaching high school English for the first year next year so we talked a lot about that. We looked over the the textbooks that her school uses and we talked about some different strategies for teaching different concepts. I think she’ll be a great teacher. I’m jealous that she didn’t come to my school so we could work together.  But it will be nice to have a fellow English teacher to throw ideas off of, and I’m hoping later on work together on curriculum ideas. Cameron and I ended up staying until almost midnight, and though we were tired, neither of us were ready to go. I’m looking forward to this friendship that has in the past been a little more than an acquaintance, (we only really spoke when life threw us together but we would talk a lot when that happened), to becoming a great friend that Cameron and I spend lots of time visiting.