Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Talent and Tenants
Fin's drawing abilities are improving so much. In pre-K, she had a hard time making anything that looked like, well, anything. Now she is doing things with lots of detail that are recognizable.
Sunday was a miserably hot day and we were making indoor fun. She went off to color and came back having made these homemade paper dolls of Ariel and Ursula. Pretty good, huh?!
Much dramatic puppetry ensued.
In an unrelated matter, we have some tenants who are refusing to pay rent... and I refuse to evict them. I went out on the back deck, which I never do unless I need to grill. In fact, I was headed out to put on a new grill cover because living here at the bayfront, covers last about 3 months before they are shredded. I noticed something amiss when I went out there.
And opened the grill to find...
Triplets! I think I scared the mother off, but I didn't touch anything with the nest and I hope she comes back soon. It's about 60 degrees out there now! Does anyone know what kind of eggs those are? I'm thinking they are something common.
Sunday was a miserably hot day and we were making indoor fun. She went off to color and came back having made these homemade paper dolls of Ariel and Ursula. Pretty good, huh?!
Much dramatic puppetry ensued.
In an unrelated matter, we have some tenants who are refusing to pay rent... and I refuse to evict them. I went out on the back deck, which I never do unless I need to grill. In fact, I was headed out to put on a new grill cover because living here at the bayfront, covers last about 3 months before they are shredded. I noticed something amiss when I went out there.
And opened the grill to find...
Triplets! I think I scared the mother off, but I didn't touch anything with the nest and I hope she comes back soon. It's about 60 degrees out there now! Does anyone know what kind of eggs those are? I'm thinking they are something common.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
How Disappointing
It has been over a week since anyone told me to "have a magical day". I miss that.
Even though it wasn't particularly magical, we both got back into the swing of work and school. Fin enjoyed taking her Mickey lollipops and brag book of vacation pictures to school. I think she was quite the rock star for about 10 minutes and her friend Jamil has offered to go with us next year. (I had yet to know there was another trip planned.)
Here are a few pictures from our week.
Fin is pretty good about entertaining herself now. These are some of the 87 pictures she took with my camera... all from the perspective of the kitchen floor. In the interest of artistic full disclosure, she staged the cat treat one.
Nancy returned from Alaska and a visit with Libby Shea. Here, Nancy and Fin exchanged souvenirs. Nancy brought Fin an adorable stuffed moose with a sweatshirt that says, "Smooch a Moose". Fin brought Nancy some customized mouse ears. At Disney, you can now pick your beanie and the ears you want to add. I would say that most people pick two of the same style ears. Not Fin!
Libby Shea sent me this picture to say "hey". (She is very advanced.)
Yesterday, Nancy and Lorna and I went up to Gloucester to take the garden tour. This is where you pay the local garden club money to go snoop around rich people's houses. Here are Nancy and Lorna on the veranda of their "rivah house".
While we were gone, Mr. Pat babysat. He and Fin moved mulch all morning. She LOVES working in the yard. When I asked her if she worked hard, she said, "No. I didn't work. I planted flowers." What a great attitude!
Mr. Pat also cooked dinner for all of us when we arrived home. After dinner, Fin got to drive the lawn tractor (blade disengaged for the lurking safety police). Such a treat!
Even though it wasn't particularly magical, we both got back into the swing of work and school. Fin enjoyed taking her Mickey lollipops and brag book of vacation pictures to school. I think she was quite the rock star for about 10 minutes and her friend Jamil has offered to go with us next year. (I had yet to know there was another trip planned.)
Here are a few pictures from our week.
Fin is pretty good about entertaining herself now. These are some of the 87 pictures she took with my camera... all from the perspective of the kitchen floor. In the interest of artistic full disclosure, she staged the cat treat one.
Nancy returned from Alaska and a visit with Libby Shea. Here, Nancy and Fin exchanged souvenirs. Nancy brought Fin an adorable stuffed moose with a sweatshirt that says, "Smooch a Moose". Fin brought Nancy some customized mouse ears. At Disney, you can now pick your beanie and the ears you want to add. I would say that most people pick two of the same style ears. Not Fin!
Libby Shea sent me this picture to say "hey". (She is very advanced.)
Yesterday, Nancy and Lorna and I went up to Gloucester to take the garden tour. This is where you pay the local garden club money to go snoop around rich people's houses. Here are Nancy and Lorna on the veranda of their "rivah house".
While we were gone, Mr. Pat babysat. He and Fin moved mulch all morning. She LOVES working in the yard. When I asked her if she worked hard, she said, "No. I didn't work. I planted flowers." What a great attitude!
Mr. Pat also cooked dinner for all of us when we arrived home. After dinner, Fin got to drive the lawn tractor (blade disengaged for the lurking safety police). Such a treat!
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Where's Duma?
I know that this will be my longest post ever. I apologize to those of you on dial-up who are now frozen and can't read past this because of all of the pictures.
We're back from DisneyWorld, from our first true family vacation. Yes, we have taken vacations before, wonderful ones, but never just us where we were not going to visit friends or family. It was one-on-one, cage match, and we enjoyed it and each other. Looking back, I don't think things could have gone more our way. I am trying not to think about how other vacations will stack up.
So, I am going to try and tackle this chronologically. We left Saturday morning and, in typical fashion, were late leaving the house and the airport is at least 20 minutes away and that is if the tunnel is clear. No traffic and the best parking space in the lot (no kidding, it was the first non-reserved space closest to the terminal... and I took a picture) later, we were at our gate and ready to leave. All carry-on to and from. I won't do that again. It really stymied our shopping. Then again, maybe it was a good thing.
We arrived at our hotel, the All Star Movies on Disney. I wasn't expecting much and when I saw we were in the building farthest from the main building, I was expecting less. It turned out to be perfect. The two far buildings have a small, auxiliary pool that was just outside of the entrance and was perfect because most people were drawn to the big, noisy pool at the main building. We went to the pool every day except for one when it rained. My little mermaid could float for hours if allowed. Also, our building was so far away from our hotel's bus stop, we were close to the bus stop of the hotel next door and could get there in a couple of minutes.
The first night, we decided not to go to a park, but we went to Downtown Disney which has shopping and eating. I went up to the Rainforest Cafe to ask how long for a table and they seated us right away at a table next to a huge fish tank. Fin loved it. After dinner, we went through the gift shop because the clever people make that the exit. In there, Fin found Duma. She has been reading a book called "Swift as the Wind", a relatively dry affair about the lives of cheetahs. She finds it fascinating, though, and I had purchased the movie "Duma" for her, which entranced her. Rainforest Cafe had a cheetah. She had to have said cheetah. She had to name him Duma. She willingly used her money that her grandparents and Aunt Em had sent to buy the cheetah. Who was I to stand in the way of true friendship. Duma would go on to accompany us everyday, everywhere. On Sunday, she bought him a "collar" (a Mickey Mouse hair scrunchie) and on Tuesday, she conned me into buying him a carrier (an electric blue Ariel purse). This cheetah travels in style. Because he was so quickly a "baby", the name given beloved stuffed animals, it would have been awful to lose him. I mean, she had already told Duma all about Giraffe and Horsie and Panda and Panda in Underwear and how they were going to be his best friends. Everytime we left a show or a ride or the bus, we asked, "Where's Duma?" It became our motto. What's the motto with you? Hee, hee.
Easter morning came and the Bunny had gotten my email. He found us at the hotel and Fin was excited. We spent Easter at Hollywood Studios and it was great. We got to see everything we wanted to see and Fin started to get a feel of what this was all about. The very first thing we did was see "Voyage of the Little Mermaid" and Ariel was right there, on stage, singing! Fin was singing, too; loudly, mostly with the wrong words, and completely off-key. She also got to meet Lightning McQueen. He was the reason she wanted to go to "Mickey's House" and it was so sweet. She walked up and said something to him, then posed for a picture, then, after mommy had PUT DOWN THE CAMERA, she leaned over and kissed his hood. ARGH!
Lighting McQueen tattoo:
Now, I am going to tell you something about Fin you may not know or believe. She is quite reserved. I know, I know... but it's true. If it is an unfamiliar situation, particularly involving lots of people, she quietly observes. I often think she hasn't enjoyed an experience until we leave and she says, "Let's do it again!" She seemed to be having fun, but was not at all effusive when talking about our day. Then came the Playhouse Disney show. Playhouse Disney are the cartoons that come on the Disney Channel and are geared for little kids. The show at Hollywood Studios is basically a puppet show with kid-sized puppets doing snippets from the shows. Oh. My. Gosh. You would have thought Elvis was on stage the way she reacted. Reserved went out the window and she was dancing and yelling and singing. Adults were scrambling to get a safe distance from her.
Going insane when Handy Manny fixed the bubble machine:
Back to the hotel for the afternoon:
That night, we went back to Downtown Disney to find the Ghiradelli Ice Cream Parlor, the first of two such excursions. She looked at that sundae like, well, like a cheetah looks at a gazelle. She told me after she had eaten her fill that it made her strong. I think she has been talking to her grandma. Well, you have to be strong to whoa-up those horses on the Downtown Disney carousel.
The next day, we went to the Magic Kingdom. She didn't really have a pre-conceived notion of the place. DisneyWorld isn't something she even knew about until we started talking about the trip. I called it "Mickey's house" to make it relevant to her. But, how could you not enjoy a trip to Disney. (I think they have a special SEAL unit with Mickey ears on their helmets that quickly extract such people.) Without that background, she didn't care much about the castle, even though it was an impressive sight at the end of the avenue. She was ho-hum about the big show going on with Mickey and Minnie and Cinderella and Peter Pan and... you get the idea. It wasn't until we got to Cinderella's Golden Carousel that she really got into it. In case you haven't been there, this is just a carousel. It's pretty and everything, but so is the one at the State Fair and the mall in Virginia Beach. She didn't care. We rode it twice right away and my best count is seven times overall, though it may have been more. The carousel became the sorbet we used to cleanse our ride palates.
Going back a bit, I read the Unofficial Guide to DisneyWorld and made notes and such in preparation for our trip. Much of it turned out to be unnecessary, but not for a good reason. The weeks before and after Easter are supposed to be the busiest of the year except for the week between Christmas and New Year. There were dire warnings of lines of 1-2 hours for popular rides, and there may have been for Space Mountain, but not for anything we wanted to see. We didn't even set an alarm in the morning and didn't leave the hotel until 9:00am most days. By using the FastPass system and going to smaller attractions and large capacity shows in between, we hardly waited at all. We did get lucky that first day when a nice engineer working on the FastPass at Winnie the Pooh gave us two sets of FastPass tickets to that ride, leaving our allotment free. That was great because Fin liked that ride, but we got to ride everything we liked multiple times over Monday and Tuesday and we really didn't feel like we spent much time in line for anything. Great for us, but not great for Disney. I don't think there were anything like the crowds they are used to over those big weeks and it was truly a sobering sign of the times. Disney is actually laying off park employees. Not good. Of course, without the current economy and the great deals to be had, we would never have been able to afford this trip. Just a bit of guilt there on my part.
Anyway, before those Disney Seals come for me, let me get back on target. We stayed at the Magic Kingdom for about eight hours. On top of the very long day we had on Sunday, we needed an afternoon nap, some pool time, and some pizza in the room.
Playing at Ariel's Grotto. We never waited in line to see her, but we played in the fountain for awhile.
It's a boring world, after all. This ride was really showing it's age. She didn't ask to ride it again.
The teacups were a hit!
Just in case the hundreds of Disney groundspeople weren't keeping the flowers watered, they needed our $2.50 a bottle water.
I have very few pictures of the two of us. She scowled when I asked park employees take our picture and many of the ones I took by holding out the camera cut off one or both of us. This one was on the Winnie the Pooh ride.
By parade time, she had had enough. She did love seeing Ariel in the parade, though, and ran around the circle on main street to follow her as the parade went by.
Tuesday was the only day it rained. We had ponchos and it wasn't a big deal. This turned out to be a terrific, and marathon, day at the Magic Kingdom.
Wet Fin with a goofy grin and a wet, grinning, Goofy statue:
She loved the hitching posts up and down Main Street. We fed many of them invisible carrots:
She was so excited to drive the race cars. These are cars that are not on a track, but have a metal bar that only let's them wander about two feet to either side. It was a jarring experience. (Why does she look so trepidatious when I am the one about to be driven by a 5-year-old?)
This, and the one in the previous post, are my favorite pictures. She was so genuinely happy. How did I get this lucky to have a daughter so beautiful, inside and out?
On our way out, there was Pluto with a short line. The whole character thing was far different than I remember from my only other trip to DisneyWorld about 12 years ago. There were far more characters just walking around then and you could encounter them. Now they are mostly all parked in one place and you have to queue up which isn't spontaneous or fun. We had our picture taken with a few, but never waited in lines more than 5 minutes long for them. She just didn't care enough to spend that time.
We left at about 4:30 and went to the hotel to dry off and put on warmer clothes before heading back to the park a couple of hours later. There were NO lines for the things we wanted to ride. It took longer to walk through the maze of Pirates' line than to ride it. It was a great time to be there. We grabbed some dinner and walked out of the restaurant with our tray only to find there was seating right there on the evening parade route! The evening parade was wonderful as was the fireworks show. Then a mass exodus headed for the exit and we headed for Tomorrowland where we rode the Buzz Lightyear ride, her favorite, several times. Though it was late, we walked a big loop and re-rode everything we wanted to with no lines before leaving at a quarter to one, just before the park closed. We were exhausted, but had a blast. It was great staying out late and getting to experience the park at night. Fin was a trooper, too. No whining or complaining or tantrums. What a kid!
She insisted security check Duma's bag, too:
They were doing games for the kids on Main Street. She loves the egg walk, even if she doesn't really get how to play:
See what I mean about her expression when someone else was taking her picture?
Talking to Grandma as we wait for the parade to start:
We slept late on Wednesday to recover before our friends arrived. Bonnie and two of her children, Ruthie and Diana, came from Tampa to see us. Fin was so excited to have a friend to play with in the pool. It was a treat for me to chat with Bonnie and see how much the girls have grown in the years since I have seen them. Bonnie was a huge support for me when I was researching my options to build a family and she helped me find a terrific agency when I went with China.
Fin and Diana had a blast!
Bonnie and Ruthie chillin' by the pool:
We went to Animal Kingdom in the afternoon, but I think that is a park for slightly older kids. I wanted Fin to go on the safari ride, but it turned out to be very frenetic and even scary for her... and the giraffes were mostly in the trees and she couldn't really see them. She liked the tree, though, and enjoyed the Lion King show (which is a re-Disneyfied version of the un-Disneyfied Broadway show). We also got to meet Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, and Tigger. She tried to steal Pooh's honey, which caused him alarm, she tickled Eeyore (because "he is too sad"), and she demonstrated her bouncing for Tigger (her favorite).
By the way, she was not at all "fooled" by the characters costumes, telling me at our first encounter with Bolt at Hollywood Studios that "There are people in there, right?" It didn't seem to take away from her enjoyment of them. However, the people in costumes were real to her, like Ariel.
We left on Thursday and had an easy, uneventful trip home. It felt very surreal getting back as if we had been gone for a month not less than a week. It felt odd to drive my own car, the office seemed stuck in time as though there should be much more waiting for me with the length of time I was gone. We were in the wardrobe and the rest of the world stayed on normal time.
Her Lightning McQueen ears. Yup, her name is on the back:
Plane ride:
So, where's Duma now? He is sleeping next to Giraffe and he seems to enjoy his new home and "best friends". Our cats are ridiculously happy to have us back. We are happy to be back, for the most part. I am thrilled not to hear the phrases "please move in and fill all available space", "take small children by the hand", and "no flash photography or video lighting" again for a long time. It does feel as if we have gone from 110 to 20mph. I asked Fin if she wanted to go to a movie today and she said, "Will they squirt water on us?" (Like many of the movie effects at DisneyWorld do.) Nope. Just plain old movies for us for a long time.
I think the biggest difference between Vacation Us and Real Life Us is that on vacation we have all of the time in the world to spend together. I can already see that Fin misses this. Real Life Mom has healthy dinners to cook and clothes to wash and pictures to upload. Vacation Mom allowed ice cream at 10:30am, had no bedtimes, and no obligations that took her away from the fun. I am going to try and be a little more Vacation Mom, though, at least with my time. I did realize that being with her is about the most fun I can have. I love this little girl!
We're back from DisneyWorld, from our first true family vacation. Yes, we have taken vacations before, wonderful ones, but never just us where we were not going to visit friends or family. It was one-on-one, cage match, and we enjoyed it and each other. Looking back, I don't think things could have gone more our way. I am trying not to think about how other vacations will stack up.
So, I am going to try and tackle this chronologically. We left Saturday morning and, in typical fashion, were late leaving the house and the airport is at least 20 minutes away and that is if the tunnel is clear. No traffic and the best parking space in the lot (no kidding, it was the first non-reserved space closest to the terminal... and I took a picture) later, we were at our gate and ready to leave. All carry-on to and from. I won't do that again. It really stymied our shopping. Then again, maybe it was a good thing.
We arrived at our hotel, the All Star Movies on Disney. I wasn't expecting much and when I saw we were in the building farthest from the main building, I was expecting less. It turned out to be perfect. The two far buildings have a small, auxiliary pool that was just outside of the entrance and was perfect because most people were drawn to the big, noisy pool at the main building. We went to the pool every day except for one when it rained. My little mermaid could float for hours if allowed. Also, our building was so far away from our hotel's bus stop, we were close to the bus stop of the hotel next door and could get there in a couple of minutes.
The first night, we decided not to go to a park, but we went to Downtown Disney which has shopping and eating. I went up to the Rainforest Cafe to ask how long for a table and they seated us right away at a table next to a huge fish tank. Fin loved it. After dinner, we went through the gift shop because the clever people make that the exit. In there, Fin found Duma. She has been reading a book called "Swift as the Wind", a relatively dry affair about the lives of cheetahs. She finds it fascinating, though, and I had purchased the movie "Duma" for her, which entranced her. Rainforest Cafe had a cheetah. She had to have said cheetah. She had to name him Duma. She willingly used her money that her grandparents and Aunt Em had sent to buy the cheetah. Who was I to stand in the way of true friendship. Duma would go on to accompany us everyday, everywhere. On Sunday, she bought him a "collar" (a Mickey Mouse hair scrunchie) and on Tuesday, she conned me into buying him a carrier (an electric blue Ariel purse). This cheetah travels in style. Because he was so quickly a "baby", the name given beloved stuffed animals, it would have been awful to lose him. I mean, she had already told Duma all about Giraffe and Horsie and Panda and Panda in Underwear and how they were going to be his best friends. Everytime we left a show or a ride or the bus, we asked, "Where's Duma?" It became our motto. What's the motto with you? Hee, hee.
Easter morning came and the Bunny had gotten my email. He found us at the hotel and Fin was excited. We spent Easter at Hollywood Studios and it was great. We got to see everything we wanted to see and Fin started to get a feel of what this was all about. The very first thing we did was see "Voyage of the Little Mermaid" and Ariel was right there, on stage, singing! Fin was singing, too; loudly, mostly with the wrong words, and completely off-key. She also got to meet Lightning McQueen. He was the reason she wanted to go to "Mickey's House" and it was so sweet. She walked up and said something to him, then posed for a picture, then, after mommy had PUT DOWN THE CAMERA, she leaned over and kissed his hood. ARGH!
Lighting McQueen tattoo:
Now, I am going to tell you something about Fin you may not know or believe. She is quite reserved. I know, I know... but it's true. If it is an unfamiliar situation, particularly involving lots of people, she quietly observes. I often think she hasn't enjoyed an experience until we leave and she says, "Let's do it again!" She seemed to be having fun, but was not at all effusive when talking about our day. Then came the Playhouse Disney show. Playhouse Disney are the cartoons that come on the Disney Channel and are geared for little kids. The show at Hollywood Studios is basically a puppet show with kid-sized puppets doing snippets from the shows. Oh. My. Gosh. You would have thought Elvis was on stage the way she reacted. Reserved went out the window and she was dancing and yelling and singing. Adults were scrambling to get a safe distance from her.
Going insane when Handy Manny fixed the bubble machine:
Back to the hotel for the afternoon:
That night, we went back to Downtown Disney to find the Ghiradelli Ice Cream Parlor, the first of two such excursions. She looked at that sundae like, well, like a cheetah looks at a gazelle. She told me after she had eaten her fill that it made her strong. I think she has been talking to her grandma. Well, you have to be strong to whoa-up those horses on the Downtown Disney carousel.
The next day, we went to the Magic Kingdom. She didn't really have a pre-conceived notion of the place. DisneyWorld isn't something she even knew about until we started talking about the trip. I called it "Mickey's house" to make it relevant to her. But, how could you not enjoy a trip to Disney. (I think they have a special SEAL unit with Mickey ears on their helmets that quickly extract such people.) Without that background, she didn't care much about the castle, even though it was an impressive sight at the end of the avenue. She was ho-hum about the big show going on with Mickey and Minnie and Cinderella and Peter Pan and... you get the idea. It wasn't until we got to Cinderella's Golden Carousel that she really got into it. In case you haven't been there, this is just a carousel. It's pretty and everything, but so is the one at the State Fair and the mall in Virginia Beach. She didn't care. We rode it twice right away and my best count is seven times overall, though it may have been more. The carousel became the sorbet we used to cleanse our ride palates.
Going back a bit, I read the Unofficial Guide to DisneyWorld and made notes and such in preparation for our trip. Much of it turned out to be unnecessary, but not for a good reason. The weeks before and after Easter are supposed to be the busiest of the year except for the week between Christmas and New Year. There were dire warnings of lines of 1-2 hours for popular rides, and there may have been for Space Mountain, but not for anything we wanted to see. We didn't even set an alarm in the morning and didn't leave the hotel until 9:00am most days. By using the FastPass system and going to smaller attractions and large capacity shows in between, we hardly waited at all. We did get lucky that first day when a nice engineer working on the FastPass at Winnie the Pooh gave us two sets of FastPass tickets to that ride, leaving our allotment free. That was great because Fin liked that ride, but we got to ride everything we liked multiple times over Monday and Tuesday and we really didn't feel like we spent much time in line for anything. Great for us, but not great for Disney. I don't think there were anything like the crowds they are used to over those big weeks and it was truly a sobering sign of the times. Disney is actually laying off park employees. Not good. Of course, without the current economy and the great deals to be had, we would never have been able to afford this trip. Just a bit of guilt there on my part.
Anyway, before those Disney Seals come for me, let me get back on target. We stayed at the Magic Kingdom for about eight hours. On top of the very long day we had on Sunday, we needed an afternoon nap, some pool time, and some pizza in the room.
Playing at Ariel's Grotto. We never waited in line to see her, but we played in the fountain for awhile.
It's a boring world, after all. This ride was really showing it's age. She didn't ask to ride it again.
The teacups were a hit!
Just in case the hundreds of Disney groundspeople weren't keeping the flowers watered, they needed our $2.50 a bottle water.
I have very few pictures of the two of us. She scowled when I asked park employees take our picture and many of the ones I took by holding out the camera cut off one or both of us. This one was on the Winnie the Pooh ride.
By parade time, she had had enough. She did love seeing Ariel in the parade, though, and ran around the circle on main street to follow her as the parade went by.
Tuesday was the only day it rained. We had ponchos and it wasn't a big deal. This turned out to be a terrific, and marathon, day at the Magic Kingdom.
Wet Fin with a goofy grin and a wet, grinning, Goofy statue:
She loved the hitching posts up and down Main Street. We fed many of them invisible carrots:
She was so excited to drive the race cars. These are cars that are not on a track, but have a metal bar that only let's them wander about two feet to either side. It was a jarring experience. (Why does she look so trepidatious when I am the one about to be driven by a 5-year-old?)
This, and the one in the previous post, are my favorite pictures. She was so genuinely happy. How did I get this lucky to have a daughter so beautiful, inside and out?
On our way out, there was Pluto with a short line. The whole character thing was far different than I remember from my only other trip to DisneyWorld about 12 years ago. There were far more characters just walking around then and you could encounter them. Now they are mostly all parked in one place and you have to queue up which isn't spontaneous or fun. We had our picture taken with a few, but never waited in lines more than 5 minutes long for them. She just didn't care enough to spend that time.
We left at about 4:30 and went to the hotel to dry off and put on warmer clothes before heading back to the park a couple of hours later. There were NO lines for the things we wanted to ride. It took longer to walk through the maze of Pirates' line than to ride it. It was a great time to be there. We grabbed some dinner and walked out of the restaurant with our tray only to find there was seating right there on the evening parade route! The evening parade was wonderful as was the fireworks show. Then a mass exodus headed for the exit and we headed for Tomorrowland where we rode the Buzz Lightyear ride, her favorite, several times. Though it was late, we walked a big loop and re-rode everything we wanted to with no lines before leaving at a quarter to one, just before the park closed. We were exhausted, but had a blast. It was great staying out late and getting to experience the park at night. Fin was a trooper, too. No whining or complaining or tantrums. What a kid!
She insisted security check Duma's bag, too:
They were doing games for the kids on Main Street. She loves the egg walk, even if she doesn't really get how to play:
See what I mean about her expression when someone else was taking her picture?
Talking to Grandma as we wait for the parade to start:
We slept late on Wednesday to recover before our friends arrived. Bonnie and two of her children, Ruthie and Diana, came from Tampa to see us. Fin was so excited to have a friend to play with in the pool. It was a treat for me to chat with Bonnie and see how much the girls have grown in the years since I have seen them. Bonnie was a huge support for me when I was researching my options to build a family and she helped me find a terrific agency when I went with China.
Fin and Diana had a blast!
Bonnie and Ruthie chillin' by the pool:
We went to Animal Kingdom in the afternoon, but I think that is a park for slightly older kids. I wanted Fin to go on the safari ride, but it turned out to be very frenetic and even scary for her... and the giraffes were mostly in the trees and she couldn't really see them. She liked the tree, though, and enjoyed the Lion King show (which is a re-Disneyfied version of the un-Disneyfied Broadway show). We also got to meet Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, and Tigger. She tried to steal Pooh's honey, which caused him alarm, she tickled Eeyore (because "he is too sad"), and she demonstrated her bouncing for Tigger (her favorite).
By the way, she was not at all "fooled" by the characters costumes, telling me at our first encounter with Bolt at Hollywood Studios that "There are people in there, right?" It didn't seem to take away from her enjoyment of them. However, the people in costumes were real to her, like Ariel.
We left on Thursday and had an easy, uneventful trip home. It felt very surreal getting back as if we had been gone for a month not less than a week. It felt odd to drive my own car, the office seemed stuck in time as though there should be much more waiting for me with the length of time I was gone. We were in the wardrobe and the rest of the world stayed on normal time.
Her Lightning McQueen ears. Yup, her name is on the back:
Plane ride:
So, where's Duma now? He is sleeping next to Giraffe and he seems to enjoy his new home and "best friends". Our cats are ridiculously happy to have us back. We are happy to be back, for the most part. I am thrilled not to hear the phrases "please move in and fill all available space", "take small children by the hand", and "no flash photography or video lighting" again for a long time. It does feel as if we have gone from 110 to 20mph. I asked Fin if she wanted to go to a movie today and she said, "Will they squirt water on us?" (Like many of the movie effects at DisneyWorld do.) Nope. Just plain old movies for us for a long time.
I think the biggest difference between Vacation Us and Real Life Us is that on vacation we have all of the time in the world to spend together. I can already see that Fin misses this. Real Life Mom has healthy dinners to cook and clothes to wash and pictures to upload. Vacation Mom allowed ice cream at 10:30am, had no bedtimes, and no obligations that took her away from the fun. I am going to try and be a little more Vacation Mom, though, at least with my time. I did realize that being with her is about the most fun I can have. I love this little girl!
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