Life As We Know It

I am a sucker for romantic comedies. But I am a sobbing wimp when it comes to romantic comedies with kids. I rented Life As We Know It thinking I was going to get a good laugh. Little did I know that I was going to cry almost as much as I did with Joy Luck Club.

This is one of my favorite Katherine Heigl films. I read that as she was making this movie and going through the new mommy experiences on film, we was also going through it in real life with her newly adopted daughter.

The story is about two people who happen to have a child thrust upon them after their best friends die. It's about Katherine (Holly) and Josh Duhamel (Messer) learning how to make it work and make it not work then make it work again. Sophie is played by triplet girls who were preemies. I have not idea what kind of baby whisperer they had on set but those babies were amazing.

There is one scene where Holly has taken Sophie to the pediatrician and has a mental breakdown. She tells the doc that she doesn't know what she is doing. I think every new parent has some kind of breakdown. It was especially true for me as a new mom to twins. My mom was in town helping me at the time and I just started crying because I wasn't sure I was going to be able to care for two babies at one time. How was I going to nurse them, bathe them and entertain them and also try to get some rest. I was exhausted from lack of sleep because I tried to nurse them every 3 hours and still try to pump. Luckily for me, my mom had little compassion for me or my postpartum depression at the time and gave me an Oscar worthy, Cher-like virtual slap and told me to snap out of it. She said that I wanted these babies so badly and now that I had them, I was crying about it.

For the next five and a half seconds, I felt very sorry for myself. I had wanted a baby for many long, infertile years and when I was finally blessed with two of them, I was wasting my time boo-hooing about it. So I snapped out of it. It would have been comforting to have my mom hug me and tell me I was doing a fantastic job but then I would have wondered when the aliens had abducted her. If I could bottle that slap in the face magic to get folks out of a funk, I would have put Prozac out of business long ago.

This movie is now on my top 32 favorite movie list. Once of these days, I'll actually make a list and figure out what the other 31 movies will be. Get it. Watch it.