What you will never see in a commercial for DisneyWorld

1. The delayed flight which brought us into Orlando at 3 am.

2. Mr. & Mrs. KuKu LaRue in line ahead of us at the car rental place arguing with the clerk for 45 minutes over a difference of $15. 



I'll tell you what begins with F - Four a.m. Check-in!

3. Day 1 in the Magic Kingdom fueled by about 6 hours of sleep, crap food and a lifetime of unachievable Disney expectations resulting in Mom sobbing quietly in the Happiest Place on Earth.  Trust me, I was not the only one.  The mom and baby rooms are as much for the distraught moms as for the babies.  Disney is missing a revenue opportunity by not putting vending machines stocked with anti-anxiety medication into those rooms.  (Hmm, today I pick Valium, no, wait, pass the Paxil, please...) It must be illegal or they would have thought of it.

4. Bankruptcy.  I waited for rain and ran around with my mouth open to avoid paying $3 for a bottle of water. 

5.  Boy 2 screaming at PHD, "Why don't you just let Mom drive!!" after we managed to take the wrong exit, again.  I was supposed to be navigating but I didn't correct him. PHD probably deserved to be yelled at for something I didn't yet know about.

6.  PHD wandering off to look at something shiny, Boy 2 running the opposite way to follow something spinny and Boy 1 running in another direction altogether in a panicked, misdirected effort to chase his dad.  That prompted the "Dad's the leader, stick to him" game.  I could then keep all three in sight and bellow, "Where's the leader?" if one of them so much as twitched in a different direction. 

Well, maybe it is just the MacFuddles you will never see in the commercial, because DisneyWorld really is as magical as you think it will be!  This was what Boy 2 wrote in his own blog before we left:

 

i am going to disny world in six weeks and we are going to ride a rollercoster and we are going swiming at the  hotell cus there is a swimming pool at the hotell it will be fun we will eat popcorn and lolypops and we will jump on the bed

I think we can even do better than that!

We started with the Magic Kingdom.  You don't feel like you are at DisneyWorld until you see the castle!

 



Note the matching bright yellow eye- catching shirts - to go with
ID tags in their pockets and strict instructions to only
talk to park staff if lost!

Dad, the parade is that way, not by those pretty girls

I told you Mom was looking.

Boy 2 is a little overstimulated

  Matching bright orange and red for Animal Kingdom

 

Nothing better than a box of bugs

 Unless it's birds with bums on their fronts, as Boy 1 pointed out

Awww

 Stitch is Boy 2's favorite new character since we went on
the Stitch ride and Stitch belched on us



After "The Lion King" which was amazing, by the way!



Boy 2 not feeling it - profile shots only please



Boy 1 now wants to be a Blue Man when he grows up

There was a whole bunch of other stuff in those 10 days, it's kind of a blur, now.  The whole vacation culminated in a beautiful cloud of fireworks, light parade and pure exhaustion.

One more freakin' smile -  we are in the

happiest place on earth

for crying out loud!

It takes a village

I had to go out of town for work yesterday.  Just a day trip but it meant I had to leave early and come home after 7.  This also means that PHD had to:

1. get the kids to school

2. meet them after school, (don't forget thursday is early dismissal) and

3. take Boy 1 to tennis lessons at 5:30. 

Can anyone guess how many of these things happened?  I will give you a hint - not three of them and not even two of them.  I wouldn't give him such a hard time over this except the night before when I started listing how the day should go without me here to initiate every activity, he got really short with me, "I know, you told me, I can handle it, you know."  So this blog, which has the sole purpose of heckling him, is his own fault.

Anyway, I got home a bit early so I thought I would drive by tennis and see how it was going.  No one there.  Hmm, must have missed tennis.  I get to the house and PHD is all alone.  Good God, did he lose both of them this time?  "Where are the kids?"  "Oh, they are playing at the neighbors' house down the street.  The mom invited them for supper."  We have known these people for 10 years, at least, and he still calls them the people down the street, and the mom down the street, along with a thumb point in a southern direction.  Anyway, "the mom down the street" knew I was away today and was looking out for the boys, thankfully!  So I say, "so you decided to skip tennis, then".  Blank look. "I thought that was at 7."  No big deal, people forget stuff all the time.  I forgot to take them to soccer a couple of weeks ago.  The tooth fairy forgot to come two nights in a row and she's magic, so it can happen to anyone.  

PHD starts telling me how the day went.  The boys wanted to ride their bikes to school so they took off on their bikes and when PHD tried to follow them the pedal fell off his bike.  He was already way behind them and jumped on my bike to catch up.  By the time he reached the school, they were already in.  He had to chase them down because they had talked him into carrying their lunches.  Only there was a BBQ lunch at school that day so he didn't even have to pack a lunch.  I could have let it go but I didn't. I wanted to get to his sheepish look quickly. (Ahh, there it is.  Sooner than I expected.)  Then, he says, "I was pretty stressed because I went to Staples and got stuck in traffic so I was worried I would be home late.  I wasn't late but our two and the two from down the street and the mom (southern thumb point) were all standing on the doorstep.  She said she would take them all to her house."  (I didn't even say anything about the trip to Staples.  Pretty generous-of-spirit of me as he isn't allowed to go there due to an unexplainable addiction to office organizers.  I do try to be kind.) I said "It's early dissmissal today. Maybe you were late?"  "Oh.  right. What time do they get out?"  Doesn't matter.  We'll have to reteach you in September, anyway.  Or maybe I will start a little homeschooling in August, for PHD.  Or not - it seems a little ambitious for me.

So, as you can see, the MacFuddles do need a village to raise their children.  Thank you "mom down the street", who miraculously seems to always know where her kids are, and mine. 

I now need to go google "How to make cool father's day presents out of a file organizer." Ideas are gratefully accepted...

Extreme Makeover

You may or may not have noticed that I haven't posted in a while - we were so busy for the last month or so, we didn't even have time to get the boys haircuts.  That, and they were both trying to grow their hair out.  Not like Justin Beiber, he's dumb.  More like Ron in Harry Potter, he's so not dumb.  I guess.  After the first outdoor swim of the year, Boy 2 declared, "I need a haircut.  My sidebangs are poking in my ears.  I don't like it."




I kind of like the Ace Ventura side sweep


Concerned he might take matters into his own hands, I got him to the hairdresser immediately.  Never one to do things half way, he declared to the stylist, "I need a buzzcut".  Five minutes later, here he is:



Now you can see the nice bruise down the middle of his forehead

 When Boy 1 came in the house with his newly shorn brother, PHD wanted to know who new kid was.  I made fun of PHD for a while then an hour later lost Boy 2 on the soccer field.  I was looking right at him, I just didn't recognize him.  You would think "sidebangs" were poking me between the ears.  Something's not working right.