Bad mums have a night off to watch Bad Moms

We’ve had a lot of rain in a short amount of time – around three inches in the last week. That’s about 75mm for those of you who went metric 40-odd years ago. So our Facebook feeds started with photos of kids splashing in muddy puddles but have now become filled with warnings of severe weather and flash flooding. We are thinking of those who have been impacted and those on alert.

Right here, we’re good. The puddles are bigger, crops are higher and water is running in little strips of land that Anthony has always called ‘creeks’.

I took the girls out to check the sheep (singular sheep. We went to visit Tiny).

Their gumboots were wet on the inside from a few days earlier, so the girls tried wearing four pairs of white socks at once to keep their feet dry. But we all know that gumboots take a whole year to dry out if they’re wet on the inside. So (#clevermotheroftheyear), I came up with a feet-water-proofing method that we can use til next September:

We stopped for the obligatory ‘kids in flowering canola’ shot:

Here’s the day last week when their gumboots got wet:

I was out that evening. I went to watch the Bad Moms movie in town. It was a fundraiser for our local Children’s Precinct, so there were plenty of us mums there who were able to justify the night out.

You know when you hear great reviews about something, there’s really only one thing that can happen, isn’t there? A friend recently lent me a book. He handed it to me and said, ‘I’ll be interested to hear what you think.’ Isn’t that a cool way to do it? I was left with nothing but interest myself in what I was going to think of it. I had no expectations.

Bad Moms is a Hollywood comedy about three exhausted mothers who buck the system. It’s about motherhood and PTAs and sisterhood.

If you don’t want to know any more about it, let me just say, ‘I’ll be interested to hear what you think.’ Now skip ahead a few paragraphs.

If every exhausted mum that you know has told you Bad Moms is laugh-out-loud hilarious and you’re going to love it, and you love hearing that sort of thing beforehand so that you have really high expectations that can only be crushed, skip ahead a few paragraphs.

I was looking forward to seeing it for ‘research’. If I was writing a book (for example…) and I wanted it to be a funny book about a group of women, this highly popular movie should be good research.

Here’s my conclusion. I found Bad Moms to be a little predictable and formulaic (can I say most Hollywood movies…). It may not change your life, but it was pretty funny and it contains a nice little heart-warming message that it’s okay for parents to make mistakes sometimes. And we shouldn’t judge each other. (Actually, it was an unexpected bit of footage in the closing credits that I found most emotional.)

Regardless, I loved the night out. I loved that we met up before the movie and again after it. There was plenty of motherhood and sisterhood and laughs out loud. Without the movie.

What about you – have you seen Bad Moms? Can you help me come up with a story for my book that isn’t predictable and formulaic? Guessing they stick to the formula because it works…