Seattle Area Families: Check out Great Family Programming from SIFF

Jun 14, 2011 By Sharon Feliciano in cool stuff, seattle

Sadly, this year’s SIFF has ended. But if you have Littles that you’d like to take to a festival film (and you should take them!), you are still in luck.

Being Elmo: A Pupeetters Journey (Winner SIFF 2011 Lena Sharpe Award for Persistence of Vision, Presented by Women in Film/Seattle) is back at SIFF Cinema on Saturday June 18, 2011 at 11:00 AM. Please go see this film. We absolutely loved it, and this could be a truly life-changing experience for the older kids in your household.

The Winner of the SIFF Films4Familes Youth Jury Award for 2011 was Circus Dreams. Circus Dreams follows the talented kids of Circus Smirkus, the only traveling youth circus in the US. This movie was chosen as a winner by a jury of kids, so your children are bound to enjoy it. It plays on Sunday June 19 at 11:00 am.

Also of note is Life in a Day. I recently learned that 35 hours of footage is uploaded to YouTube every minute. So what is uploaded? A lot of it is people just doing their everyday thing. Director Kevin MacDonald carefully selected 300 clips that all show people around the world on the same day (July 24, 2010) and wove it into the first collaborative user-generated feature film. This one may be a little boring for the younger ones, but everything I’ve read leads me to believe it would be a fine film for older kids. Sunday June 19 at 3:30 PM.

All of the Best of SIFF films screen at Siff Cinema located at:
321 Mercer St
at 3rd Avenue, McCaw Hall
Seattle Center

There is plenty of easy pay parking around. Tickets can be purchased here.

Superhero Costumes Reimagined as “Every Day” Outfits.

May 23, 2011 By Sharon Feliciano in cool stuff

I really like this idea. Of course, I don’t actually dress this trendily, nor does anyone I hang out with, but I could totally see Kit being into this idea.

The images at the link are all DC characters, but the artist (Katrina Navarro) has promised some Marvel inspired outfits as well. I would love to see Phoenix and Emma Frost in “real” clothes, and Jubilee is in desperate need of a wardrobe update.

via: Project Rooftop

Which costume would you like to see reimagined?

A Socially Awkward Love Song and Getting Married Young

May 19, 2011 By Sharon Feliciano in cool stuff

A love song referencing chaos theory, alternate universes, bell curves, and statistics. I find it to be pretty romantic, but I’m a dork like that.

I’ve been married for one-third of my life. Not my adult life, my whole life. Super-Dad and I were recently talking about arranged marriages and how they are statiscally less likely to end in divorce than a marriage for love. One of the theories about this -which would explain a lot about the longevity of our own marriage- is that in arrainged marraiges, people grow to love each other.

Of course SD and I were in love with each other when we got married. Unlike many of our peers who waited, we got married pretty much right away and at a young age (He was 22, I was 20 and we had been dating for about 18 months). We spent time growing with each other and getting to know each other after we were married. We didn’t wait to make sure we were each other’s “one”. We became each other’s one. We both grew and learned and compromised. I think a lot of that has to do with being young enough to not be set in our ways, and inexperienced enough to not have too many strong ideas about what our ideal mate would be like.

Being married at young age has had it’s disadvantages as well. It would have been a lot easier had we had been more financially and professionally established when we started a family. Had we waited a little longer to have children (I was pregnant when we got married, though we were engaged) we could have traveled more, seen more shows, gotten new hobbies. Both of us have felt at times that we settled down too soon and missed out on some of the fun that our friends were having while we were at home changing diapers and being monogamous. Though now that we have kind of equlized, with most of our friends being married and having babies, I’m realizing we really didn’t miss out on all that much.