In an attempt to somewhat balance the “what a terrible parent” image I presented earlier this week, here’s a short account of some of what we’ve done over the last couple of weekends.
This past weekend featured a family trip to the movies to see one of the two HRM showings of the new(ish) Cirque de Soleil film, Delirium.
Sarah is a pretty big fan of acrobatics, and we all like spectacle, so it seemed like a good idea. It was a little silly expensive, at $22 a ticket, but we decided to do it anyway–it’s certainly cheaper than the recent live performances here by the Cirque, and we’d have a much better view of the action.
Apparently either the showings were under-marketed (we only found out about the by accident while looking for times when Trish and I could go to Passchendale) or the price was too high for the market, because there were exactly 5 people in the theatre to see the showing, and at least three of them were McLarens. The recent live performances all sold out, and their tickets were much more expensive, so it’s not that Helltown doesn’t like Cirque…
I did kind of like the feeling of having my own private theatre showing, but I wonder about the economics of it all.
Watching this kind of show in this format is both good and bad. It’s good in that you can see detail that you would never be able to see from the real audience, and because the sound is perfect, which it wouldn’t be in a live venue. It’s bad because this show has a lot of things going on across the stage at any given point in time, but you don’t get to see it all–you get to see what the director has chosen to show you. So it’s a trade off–you get a much better view of the things that are “in focus” at the expense of a “big picture”. For the actual circus performances that are interspersed through the show, this is great. For some of the other spectacle, it’s annoying–especially the director’s preference for closeups of singers at the expense of everything else happening on the stage.
I can take or leave the music and dancing. Most of the “spectacle” stuff was cool, but not mind-shattering. However, some of the actual circus performances were stunning. The guy doing the one-arm handstand, for example, was friggin’ Batman–it’s almost impossible that a human could do some of the things he did. The visuals of the hula-hoop woman were very cool, and some of the things she did also speak of an unimaginable amount of practice.
Sarah said she quite enjoyed it.
The weekend before that we took in some of the Maritime Fall Fair. Trish and I have been to this a number of times, and it is infinitely more fun with Sarah than it ever was without her.
Sarah met up with one of her friends to take in the midway part of the fair together–the fair last year was the first time Sarah had gone on amusement park rides, including her first roller-coaster (which she loved, but which experience was traumatic for her mother).
I very much enjoyed watching Sarah and her friend on the rides–they were having a very good time and were terribly excited on the rides themselves. And watching Sarah and Trish go together on the “grown-up” Ferris wheel was pretty cool too.
In addition to the carnival, we also took in some of the other stuff at the fair, including visiting the stables, and watching some horse and dog shows. Sarah loved it.
The weekend before that we took a trip to the Oaklawn Farm Zoo in the valley. We went there once last year, in mid-August, and it was kind of an endurance test; it was too hot for us, and for the animals. This visit was much better.
Normally if I were recounting stories about going to the zoo with my kid, the cutest thing in the story would be something about Sarah. Something like a picture of her petting a llama in the “wander around with the animals” part of the zoo:
On this trip, the two cutest things though had nothing to do with Sarah.
One was a mother gibbon with her tiny baby. Sarah watched them for over 20 minutes–they weren’t even really doing anything.
Here’s the zoo’s picture of the baby when it was born:
And here’s the baby and mother together–I couldn’t find a better shot on the website, and for some reason I didn’t take any pictures of the gibbons myself:
The other cutest thing at the zoo was the cage where they kept the baby foxes in with the meerkats. Try to resist going “Awww” here; this is certainly the cutest animal photo I have ever taken:
In between those two weekends I took a Wednesday off, so that we could take a family holiday. We did a day-trip to Moncton–listening to “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” on the way there, in order to take Sarah to Crystal Palace.
Sarah was awesome on the roughly three-hour drive there, and we arrived there around 11:30 in the morning. We walked in to discover everything closed and powered down. Trish and I had a moment of terror, thinking that we had taken Sarah on this long trip in order to get there to find that there was no there there. However, it turned out that it just didn’t open until noon, so we went to have lunch. We came back to find it open, but empty–apparently on a Wednesday afternoon during the school year right at opening time, there isn’t much demand.
In essence Sarah had the whole park to herself. We wandered around doing just what we wanted with no lines and no delays.
The only issue was that Trish was worried about Sarah going on certain rides. For instance we had to sneak Sarah onto the Jumpin’ Star while Trish was off to the washroom (this was one of those cases where I was right about not being over-protective–as opposed to the scary story case):
As the day wore on, more kids appeared, and by the end of the day Trish and I were part of a ragged group of parents following a pack of four-year old girls around–the girls running together from ride to ride and announcing that they “were friends now”.
Sarah also loved that day, and was a rockstar about the drive home that night also.
Wow… we’ve been doing a lot of extra stuff lately. I wonder if we’re spoiling her…
