The Princess Convention

Hey y'all - 

The downside to blogging about our vacation a few weeks after the fact is that I'm starting to lose track of what happened on what day. Normally, I could just look at what folks are wearing in the pictures and say, "Oh! That must have been a different day!" That tactic doesn't really work with photos of Laney from this trip, because she endeavored to wear that Cinderella dress every waking minute of the vacation. 

On our first official Disney day, we headed to the Magic Kingdom. Side note to anyone thinking of going to Disney World: you MUST go the week before Thanksgiving: crowds are the smallest they're going to be all year, and the weather is reasonable. As we all know, if the outside temp gets above 80, your furry dad combusts into a pile of ash, so we have to do all of our traveling south of the Mason-Dixon between Nov-Jan. In this case, it paid off, because the longest we had to wait to ride anything was ten minutes. 

(One of my favorite pictures from the whole vacation)

 Laney wanted to ride EVERYTHING. Here's Laney and her dad coming off Goofy's Barnstormer roller coaster. According to Thor, she looked positively terrified for the entire ride, and then as soon as it came to a stop, demanded, "Let's do it again!"

This is Peg Peg sitting on the "It's A Small World" boat:

If any of our readers rode this ride as children, they probably remember it as being repetitive and loud and overwhelming, sort of the audio equivalent of someone rattling a drawer of silverware inside your head. You remember it correctly.

There aren't many pictures of Hagen from this day, because a standard day for Hagen included getting dosed with ibuprofen and then sleeping away in the stroller. Here's Hagen asleep in Tomorrowland! Here's Hagen asleep in Adventureland! See? That wouldn't make for a very interesting photo collection, would it? However, Hagen DOES love a train, so he managed to rouse himself to ride the train to Frontierland.

The big hits for Laney were The Adventures of Winnie The Pooh, Ariel's Undersea Adventure, and The Flight of Peter Pan. 

 The coolest thing to me was that Uncle Nate is currently working at the Magic Kingdom, helping to build a new Seven Dwarves-themed runaway mine train ride. We could look through the tiny observation window and catch a glimpse of him as he worked. Laney already thinks that Nate single-handedly built the city of Missoula, so this only cemented her opinion of him as being at least 20% cooler than Bob The Builder.

But the big deal at Disney are the princesses. A multi-billion dollar franchise, they seem to have hijacked the imaginations of little girls everywhere, including the one in our traveling party. So we waited in line half an hour to meet Rapunzel and Snow White. In the line in front of us was a 15 year-old girl who had hand-sewed her own Princess gown and was waiting to collect some of the very last princess autographs she needed to make her collection complete. The girl was sweet, but definitely going through a whackadoo phase, so I talked to Laney and abandoned Peg to Princess Tenth Grader. I only mention it here, because years from now I know Peg will want to remember the half hour she spent in line learning the biographies of every princess ever to appear in a Disney film.

At last, it was our turn to meet Rapunzel:

They exchanged notes on hair accessories, and there was an "I like your dress" / "I like your dress, too!" moment, and a super-sweet hug. Laney was less impressed with Snow White - maybe because Snow's voice is freakishly high, even to the ears of a four year-old.

Soon it was time for us to hop on the monorail and head off for our next adventure.

People have been asking me how Laney liked the Disney trip. It seems like she was exposed to an overwhelming amount of adventure and new stimuli, and it has taken her brain about two weeks to start processing it all. She didn't have much to say about it while we were there, but last night as we were driving to the taco place up the road, out of nowhere, she asked, "Mom? Mom? Mommommomomom?!?" "What, Laney?" "What was your favorite part of the Winnie the Pooh ride? Was it the Heffalumps and Woozles, or when Tigger made our car bounce up and down?" To be honest, I only vaguely remember riding the dern ride at all.

A month or so from now when she's got it all computed, I can't wait to hear what her favorite parts were.

Love,
Mom