Babies and Scallops, Scallops and Babies - Lauren's Week

Welcome to my first post of the ‘what Lauren has been doing’ type. I’m sure you all have been eagerly anticipating it is as much as we all waited excitedly for 6:01pm on Saturday*, Rapture Fail jokes in hand and twitter as our joke dispenser.

I could only think of one really, really share worthy topic today, but it’s so worth it you won’t even notice that it looks like I’ve only done one awesome thing all week (believe me, the week has been filled with awesome, but there’s a big difference between awesome to do and awesome to blog about, isn’t there?).

Babies

I cannot even find words for how much I enjoyed this movie. After reading about it in a cinema newsletter last week and watching the trailer I knew I had head along and see this one of the big screen. As a bonus, it had been far too long since I’d enjoyed some simple time out by myself (one of my favourite things), so I blocked out Sunday afternoon as Lauren Time, headed a couple of suburbs out to my favourite cinema, got a iced bun from the bakery and settled in for what I expected to be a very cute experience.

Babies follows the lives of four babies from around the world, through infancy to their first birthday. There is Mari from Japan, Ponijaro from Namibia, Bayar from Mongolia and Hattie from the USA. The best part of this film is that there is no language, occasionally mum or dad might speak or sing to the baby, but words really play a tiny to no part in a viewer’s understanding of what’s going on. It’s all about simple observation and celebrates the specialness of each moment in the babies’ live.

This film is very special. It is a remarkable tool for re-opening our minds which can sometimes fall closed and become too judgemental, and I’d urge anybody, whether they are interested in having their own children or not, regardless of whether they actually ‘like children’, to see it. I as though Babies served for me as a soft prod into remembering how small the section of the world that I live in is, and how ok it is that everybody else around me is living in a slightly different way. There were two families in the cinema for my session, one couple with their own new little bub and two mothers with a collection of seven kids between them, and it was lovely seeing the children react to the quiet lessons they were being taught about acceptance, understanding and empathy.

Babies made me laugh, made me cry and made me think. Watch the trailer below. Then see it.



* The Rapture was supposed to occur in Australia at 6pm on Saturday afternoon. I’m pretty glad it didn’t, because all week I had been planning to get the most amazing potato scallops with my friend Sophie, and all week I had been imagining how good they were going to be, but we were running slightly late and at 6pm hadn’t quite made it to the fish and chips place. I would have been pretty put out if I’d held off scallop time for so long and then Lucifer had been all, “You shall not have scallops! Raaw!” So I’m happy.