It is school vacation week here in our house.

{I’ll stop for a moment of Mom silence……}

You know how it is (and how the week isn’t). Thus, I’m always looking for something fun to do with the kids (while wistfully thinking about the things I need to be doing.) We had to temper our travels due to the majority of brisk spring temps and misty days. Yet, those end up being the perfect days for hunkering down in comfy clothes and watching movies.

The kids were excited to watch a new movie that I enticed them with most of the week – Paddington. When it was finally ‘movie day’, my daughter woke up that morning and asked if it was ‘Bear Day.’ Sure, enough, it did become a day of bears. The kids found all the bears in the house they could find.

Then we made “beary good” cupcakes. Since my kids don’t like chocolate very much, I made a brown bear, while the kids opted for a ‘polar bear’ look. Not really in line with the Paddington movie, but we took creative (toddler and preschool) liberties in our cupcake decorating. Regardless, the cupcakes were very tasty.

The kids took, err, even more liberties with their bear crafts. The directive was to color the white paper plate brown, draw a bear face, and glue on the red construction paper hat. As you can see, my son decided he wanted it to be blue and red and white, like London. My daughter, well, let’s just say it was very creative and not on point. However, it was a fun activity and got them even more excited for the movie, which was the gist anyway.

We hunkered down to watch the movie. Now, before you laugh, know that I downloaded the movie from Amazon. However, the one thing I have not quite mastered/figuredout/gottenaround to doing is watching a digital movie on my TV. It’s a learning curve, financial investment, and time allocation situation so, since Mommy didn’t quite know how to watch the movie on the massive flat screen TV in our family room, we watched it on the 8 inch Kindle screen…in the family room.

Luckily my kids are young enough to not know, and were just excited enough to watch the movie, that it didn’t really matter the size of the screen. We put a blanket over us and snuggled together to watch it and enjoyed it immensely.

My 5 year old laughed, I cringed at the bear demise within the first 5 minutes of the movie, and my 2 year old kept saying “Aww, he’s so cute Mommy,” then we all enjoyed watching his hilarious adventures throughout the 90 minutes or so. As a Mom, it is such an amazing sound to hear your kids laugh, and they laughed a lot during the movie.

Overall, we are not big Movie people (obviously since I can’t figure out how to watch a digital movie on my TV), but this is one of the movies we would have gone out to buy on our own. We noticed that it is on our TV (ironically) as part of our local cable companies movie selections, so you can always check it out that way, and if you love the movie as much as we did, get a permanent digital copy to own on iTunes or Amazon.

If you decide to make a movie night or movie viewing party out of it, check out my Pinterest Board with some bear related crafts.

Then consider dressing for the occasion my Paddington inspired outfit!

And don’t forget books too. They are just as fun as the movie!

Follow the Paddington fun on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest!

This post is part of a sponsored campaign with Starz and MomSelect. All thoughts and opinions are my own.