Priceless

Pretty decent weekend. Penny went to two separate birthday parties and really enjoyed both.

Saturday night was Matt's game at the Hegemony, and that was fun, even if our dice were all on strike and trying to kill us. We didn't get home until late, naturally, so we were good and tired on Sunday.

Sunday morning, Matt said to me, "Hey, let's take the kids to see The Avengers today."

I said, "I'm still not sure they'll sit through it." It's got lots of long talky parts that were going to go over their heads, and I wasn't sure if the PG-13 violence would be just a smidge more than Alex could comfortably take.

But we got the Hegemony into the act, too. So at 3:30, we found ourselves taking over most of a row of seats at the theater, the kids in the middle and the adults anchoring either end. Matt and I kept looking down the row to where Alex and Penny were sitting to see how they were handling things...

And they handled things very well, indeed. All the kids cheered for Black Widow's initial scene of kicking ass, and cheered again for Iron Man's first appearance. They all got more of the jokes than I expected -- Penny even laughed at the "He's adopted" line. I had to take Alex to the bathroom once, and a little while after that, he decided he'd rather sit on my lap than in his chair, but he did seem to be having a great time. When Iron Man was jump-starting the helicarrier's engine, he was urgently chanting, "You can do it! You can do it! You can do it!" under his breath, and he laughed uproariously at the Hulk's scene-stealing moments.

Better still, they were all incredibly enthusiastic about the movie after it had ended. Both of them were still talking about it in the car this morning on the way to school (and asking me for action figures). I've never been so happy to be wrong about whether the kids are ready for something.

As I said on Twitter later: movie tickets: $35. Popcorn and candy: $10. Cementing your kids' destiny as geeks: priceless.