I'm going to bed, so choose your own title!

Yesterday, I went to the Children's/Young Adult Literature Conference at BYU-I with my friend Kareena--who, by the way, is 9 months pregnant. Every time she made a noise, I found myself looking over the make sure she wasn't going into labor. Good times! Actually, it was a great conference. Lois Lowry, two-time Newbery Award winning author of the Giver, among other books, was one of the keynote speakers. She was very entertaining. After the conference, I had her sign a couple of books for me. I mentioned that I would be writing a paper on examining grief through literature and asked if she'd mind me contacting her if I had any questions (I plan to reference several of her books in my paper). She was gracious enough to give me her business card with her email address and phone number on it.

Parker had one of those all-day dates leading up to the Homecoming Dance, so he wasn't around for most of the day. This left Hayden, Cameron and Jacob to fend for themselves; I was gone from 8 a.m. until nearly 5 p.m. Before I left, I made a bargain with the boys: if they promised to not kill each other, or damage the house in any way, I would take them to see the Disney movie G-Force later that evening--a promise I would come to regret. Don't get me wrong: it served its purpose as a powerful motivator for civil behavior--only one phone call the entire time I was gone, and then only to ask what time I'd be home. The flaw in my plan was the movie choice.

G-Force is about a crack team of highly-trained Special Ops FBI agents who happen to be...guinea pigs. Yup, you read that correctly. And not ordinary guinea pigs--guinea pigs capable of conversing with humans and operating sophisticated electronic equipment.


I'm as willing as the next guy to suspend disbelief when it comes to kid's films, but the dialogue was an endless stream of poorly-crafted one-liners, with little else to redeem it from contention as possibly the worst film of 2009. Simply put, it was painful. Fortunately, I fell asleep, missing a large chunk of the movie. The boys, on the other hand, loved it. Cameron asked if I would buy it when it comes out on DVD. I smiled and said nope. So he and Hayden are planning to pool their resources to make the purchase. Maybe [read hopefully] they'll change their minds.