Movie Night!

Once a week, on Tuesdays, our Mooselandia home is turned into Gaming Central. We have between three and five guests, plus at least one person Skyping in. However, the game tends to run well into the night, which leaves Mad Natter out from playing. And so, in an effort to make sure he doesn't feel unwelcome or left out, I instituted Movie Night.  Every Tuesday night, we retire to The Big Bedroom, turn on a movie, eat popcorn in the bed, and hang out together.

What this means for us is pretty simple. Mad Natter is not wreaking havoc all over everyone's RPG night, he's "contained" without any kind of fuss, and I have the opportunity to introduce him to pop culture as we go.

You see, Mad Natter and I have a kind of schedule. He picks two movies, then I pick one. So we see things like Frozen, then The LEGO Movie, and then Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The next cycle was Wreck-It Ralph, and The Avengers, and then Back To The Future. We typically have popcorn, though we're now starting to branch out into Twizzlers, and Mad Natter and I get time to just sit, relax, watch, and be together without there being any kind of outside influence - video games, kids outside, whatever.

It works out really well, honestly. We get time to repair any rifts in relationship from the prior week (which, honestly, when you have two of us with almost identical intensities, happens more frequently than I'd like), we get time to sit and snuggle, and Mad Natter slowly learns most of our movie references.  In fact, the other day he fell, skinned his knees, and shouted "It's just a flesh wound!" and went back to play.

It's been a godsend, actually, just relaxing and giving Skeeve and Omero time to play games together, and allowed all of us to help manage balancing our lives together. Entirely too helpful to keep the notion to myself.