The 20 stages of watching a film when you have children

Watching a film seems to have become a big event in our house since we had a baby. We always plan it but it hardly ever actually happens. Although it’s not as rare as our cinema going…the last film we saw was X-Men First Class, nearly three years ago.

In theory, watching a film should be a simple two step process of 1) pick film 2) watch film. But in practise, when you have children?

Here’s what it’s actually like:

1. Decide to watch a film that evening
2. Get mildly excited as this rarely happens, and there’s loads we both wanted to see and missed at the cinema
3. Try and get child to bed on time
4. Child decides tonight is not the night to go to sleep, and “more stories please, mummy!”
5. Two hours later…finally sit down together and turn on Netflix
6. Fail to remember a single film we wanted to watch
7. Have a general scroll through all the suggestions to see what’s out
8. Immediately disagree on the type of film we want to watch
9. Agree to a compromise…kind of
10. Spend 20 minutes searching categories for something we both like
11. Child wakes up
12. Once she’s back asleep, spend 20 minutes discussing if it’s now too late to watch a film
13. Finally agree on film; then be struck by fear there might be something better on and spend ten minutes scrolling through to look at alternatives
14. Watch film we’d first decided on
15. Multiple pregnancy loo breaks; pause
16. Multiple snack breaks; pause
17. Get to a crucial, cliffhanging plot point…
18. …and inevitably, child wakes up
19. Take so long to settle her that we give up, go to bed and watch the end on the iPad
20. Say ‘this is great, why don’t we watch a film more often?’

Which is why we aways end up watching a TV series on Netflix instead, or something more like this. Although here’s a list of the 101 best films to watch on Netflix. Taking note for next time…

I’m a member of the Netflix Stream Team, for which I was given an annual subscription to Netflix and an iPad to watch it on.