“Mom, look, Charlie found the golden ticket. Did you see that?”

“Mom, Veruca Salt is really mean. She can knock people’s heads off with her bare hands. Did you see that?”

“Mom, they can eat the grass, would you eat the grass?”

Now is a good time to mention that in honor of our trip to Hershey, the ladies were watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

About 75 minutes into the barrage my concussion and head cold got the better of me and I turned around and yelled, “Ladies, REALLY. Can’t you see Mommy is trying to take a nap? MUST you ask me 9,000 questions? What about your FATHER? Can’t you see he is in the car? If you MUST ask 9,000 questions, why not throw a few his way and let me have a few minutes of peace? Can you give me one good reason why you are harassing me and not him? Just one?”

Without missing a beat Cat said, “Daddy is DRIVING Mom and you always tell us never to bother the driver. It’s not safe to bother him but it’s fine to bother you.”

After pizza and the usual period of indiscriminately tearing around the house, everyone settled down for popcorn and a movie. The evening’s feature presentation was Earth, Disney’s recent nature documentary. It didn’t have any sarcastic superheroes or talking rodents, but it managed to keep the kids’ attention nonetheless.

As usual with nature documentaries, this one eventually showed a high-tension chase, with a speedy predator going after something slower and doomed. In this case it was a cheetah and a Thompson’s gazelle.

Everyone had a different reaction to the thrilling sequence. Each, I think, demonstrates well the way our brains work at different ages.

Thirty-somethings Byron and I wondered how they managed to get these shots. How long do these people have to sit still, in the jungle or on the tundra, waiting for the chase to happen? Can they bring a book or an iPod? Wow, think of the peace and quiet. And what kind of cameras do they use? The clarity is amazing. It’s crazy how technology keeps advancing.

Elementary-school-age Mack, Kiley and Aidan were yelling, “Is the cheetah going to catch him? The gazelle is pretty fast! Is the gazelle going to get away? What is the cheetah going to do to him? He’s going to eat him, isn’t he! Gross! Is there going to be blood? Will we see the blood? How much blood?”

Three-year-old Reid said nothing through the whole chase. He seemed riveted by the action, deep in thought. Then he turned to us and said, “I wish I had a tail.”

I was sorting laundry, waiting for them to finish, when I heard Mack call out, “Mommy, I cut myself. There’s blood.” I walked into the bathroom, assuming it would be something like a nick on the toe, only to find that he had somehow sliced the side of his wrist open. The cut was about an inch long and there was indeed blood – a lot of blood.

I had the reaction I generally have when one of my boys is bleeding. Was it a quick rush to action, with exceptional first aid accompanied by calming words, you ask? No, I panicked and screamed, “Byron! Byron! Help!”

Believe me, I don’t report this because I think it is a charming quirk. I hate how I panic when the boys are hurt; I worry that someday it might hamper my ability to help them when they really need it. But when I see blood on one of the boys, my brain goes all wonky.

This effect is especially pronounced when the injured son is Mack. In his eight short years, Mack has cultivated a certain mystique of invulnerability. He almost never gets sick, even so much as a sniffle. He laughs off cuts and bruises, gets dental work without anesthesia, and has been known to run (and win) two distance races on the same day, with a soccer game and a swim practice sandwiched between.

So when Mack gets hurt, it’s kind of like that part in Superman II, where Superman gives up his powers so he can be with Lois Lane. (Which, can we all just stop to agree – big mistake. She wasn’t into you for your nerdy glasses and knowledge of AP style, Clark.) Anyway, they come down from the Fortress of Solitude and go into that diner. The local bully starts up with Clark and eventually socks him in the nose. When blood actually comes out, we all freak because it is just so shocking and incongruous.

Luckily, last night Byron was just down the hall and came to the rescue. It took about 50 tissues, several pieces of gauze, medical tape, Neosporin, butterfly bandages and sports strips, but he got the bleeding stopped and the wound bandaged. We decided it didn’t even require stitches. (Again, the Mack Mystique. If it had been Aidan, the cut would have been just that little bit deeper and we would have been headed to the ER, no question.)

Once we were both recovered, I asked Mack how he cut himself. Turns out he got himself on something as he reached up to put the soap back in its dish. We couldn’t figure out what it was; it may have just been the plastic edge of my shampoo tube. I told him I was so sorry that such a weird accident happened to him and he replied, “You told me the bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house.”

I just spent the last two hours watching, back to back, the last hour of Dirty Dancing and the last hour of The Karate Kid. Now, I have probably seen Dirty Dancing - and this is just a rough estimate – four hundred million times. And we own a DVD copy of The Karate Kid, so I could watch it commercial-free any time I wanted.

But there I sat, mesmerized, as the minutes rolled by and midnight came and went. The laundry didn’t get done, and I didn’t finish the book that’s due back to the library tomorrow, and I vaguely remember Byron telling me at some point he was going to bed. None of it mattered, when compared to “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” and “Get ‘im a body bag!”

Tomorrow, I’ll be dragging myself out of bed, when I’ve pushed the snooze button twice more than I really should have. I’ll be harried and exhausted and I’ll be mentally kicking myself, wondering what in the hell I was thinking staying up this late to watch old eighties movies that I’ve seen so many times.

But some movies have the power to make you forget everything but that really good scene that’s coming up after the next commercial break.

Now I’m off to bed, although maybe first I’ll flip through the channels and make sure nobody is showing The Princess Bride.

At the end of the article is a quotation from Apatow, saying of their relationship, “At its core, that’s what Knocked Up is about: It makes no sense that this woman likes this guy. And that’s the story of Judd and Leslie.”

I then thought, “Isn’t their older daughter around ten years old?” I checked, and the daughter was born sometime in 1997.

So they weren’t dating long, and she got pregnant, and they got married. And she is a blond hottie who had a rising career. And he’s a kind of shlubby guy who hadn’t really hit it big yet. And they had a girl.

So why did nobody bring this up in ANY of the articles about Knocked Up?

So I was screwed. For only the second time in 14 years, I will not see all five best picture nominees before the Oscars.

It was a mistake in the theater’s newspaper listing, so I threw a hissy fit with management and got a free pass for any time in the next month. But that is cold comfort when I have failed so abjectly.

The actors continue to get better with each film. Thanks to their growing skills, and some excellent direction, this movie is the best so far at conveying some of the complicated undertones of its accompanying book. In this case, these have to do with the encroaching adolescence of Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione. The movie does a deft job showing how complicated, exciting and downright humiliating the first teenage years can be. In the scenes on this topic, it is poignant and very funny.

Additionally, the movie subtly, beautifully illustrates Harry’s growing sense of separation from his peers — his feeling that he is cursed never to enjoy the simple pleasures that they take for granted.

This is the most frightening of the movies thus far, which is fitting as the fourth book was significantly “darker” than those which came before it. Several of the scenes caused even this adult — who knew what happened next — to squirm a bit.

My one big complaint about the film is that the filmmakers seem to have made a very conscious effort not to hew too closely to the book. In some ways this is good. But, since Goblet of Fire is my favorite Harry Potter book, it was also somewhat of a letdown. There are certain lines, certain scenes, that stand out in the book as special. Often, watching the movie, the appropriate line of dialogue from the book would run through my head just before a character should have spoken the line onscreen. But the “right” words never came. Every time, the line was either altered or omitted entirely. Additionally, my favorite scene in the book, and probably of the whole series, did not appear in the film at all (I’ll leave the details of this out, for the sake of those who haven’t seen the movie).

I understand that the filmmakers did not set out to make a Jill-personalized film and that they cannot include all my favorite tidbits. However, I imagine that some of my favorites are also the favorites of many other millions of people. A few direct quotations from the book would have made us feel oh-so-special.

All in all, I definitely recommend this film if you are a Harry Potter fan. And if you are not a Harry Potter fan….then what the heck are you thinking?