For this month’s #YearOfHappy, the challenge was to do something you always wanted to do as a kid.
Well, like every other month, I’m tweaking the rules. I decided to do something I used to do as a kid that I stopped doing when I became an adult.
I used to stay up all night with my friends during sleepovers just like any other kid. Of course, when I got older I couldn’t do that because I would have school the next day or work or church. There was always something.
Now that it’s summer vacation for me and I have no more school and work is done for a few months, I decided to stay up all night.
I love staying up throughout the night. I don’t know why, but there’s something lovely about being the only one awake in the house. It’s peaceful and I’m guaranteed privacy.
I thought of staying up to write and/or read all night, but then had a different idea.
Because Kris and I are geeks, we’ve always wanted to have a marathon of the three Lord of the Rings and three Hobbit movies. To watch all six in a row would take a little over 21 hours (this counts for the extended edition to all the movies except the latest one). We rounded up to 24 hours because we need to pause for bathroom, snacks, etc.
If we wanted to watch all six movies straight through right in a row, we would have to stay up all night. So that’s just what we did–or what we tried.
We started with the Hobbit movies to watch the story in chronological order. Plus, we’ve never seen The Battle of the Five Armies and we knew we’d cry. So we wanted to get that out of the way.
By the time we finished watching the first two Hobbit movies, it was about 1:30 in the morning. We decided to go to bed. Neither one of us were really tired, but wanted sole focus on the last movie since we’ve never seen it.
We woke up early the next morning and watched the last Hobbit movie and all three Lord of the Rings movies–which ended around one in the morning.
So, we didn’t stay up all night but we did stay pretty late for two nights in a row.
We worked on a Lion King puzzle while watching the movies so I think that was what kept us up. Plus, we bought snacks before we started the marathon. So we were eating plenty of chocolate and such.
I originally thought I would write or read all night long–be productive. Instead, I ended up spending two days not being productive.
It was nice, though. I’ve been on summer vacation for a week, but that was really the first time in a while that I didn’t have anything planned. It was nice to have plans to do nothing.