Spring Break has come and gone, differentiated from any other week in quarantine by its days gloriously-free from the schedule confines of daily learning plans. The kids loved playing together, and I enjoyed the lazy, slower starts to the days.
Sometimes it’s a challenge to find something that both adults and the kids enjoy doing together. Besides bike-riding around our neighborhood, working on puzzles, and eating yummy food together, we also discovered a few super fun and interesting Disney+ nature documentaries that kept all of us entertained.
First up was the newest one, Elephant, narrated by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, OF COURSE! Guess whose suggestion that one was? 😉 Objectively, her narration did a great job bringing humor and compassion to the story, which follows a matriarchal family of African elephants as they make their way across the Kalahari Desert.
The second documentary we watched was about Adélie penguins because, well, they’re just so darn cute! This film spotlights a penguin named Steve, who goes on his first quest as an adult male, to build a nest, find a partner, and raise a family. Steve is voiced by Ed Helms, who infuses his character with lots of goofy relatability.
The kids enjoyed it overall, but there were a few more perilous situations than the Elephant doc had. There’s a crazy-strong wind snowstorm that buries some of the mama penguins as they’re protecting their eggs, including the mama that we’ve been following in the show. There is a real moment of anxiety as we assume that she doesn’t make it, which scared my little guy N. Thankfully, the mama ends up surviving and keeping her eggs alive too. Orca whales and leopard seals, both penguin predators, appear and create a sense of danger. We even see leopard seals hunt and catch a few young penguins, which made Syd pretty anxious and scared.
On the positive side, it’s fun and very silly at times, which made the kids LOL. They also loved learning about and watching the regurgitation feeding method between the parents and chicks. So much so that they spent the rest of the day, and some of the next, pretending to feed each other by regurgitation.
Next up is Born In China, which we’ve watched nearly half of so far. My first assumption was that it’s about pandas in China, but to my delight, the documentary also tells the story of snow leopards and golden snub-nosed monkeys, both also indigenous to China. And as you can see in the image above, the story very much focuses on the mama-child relationships of these species, which made it that much more sweet to watch on Mother’s Day. John Krasinski’s narration is also spot-on and the breathtaking scenery is a perfect escape for these times.