When we last spoke, we had returned to the hotel and Leah was sleeping. She had to be awakened shortly thereafter to head for a dinner engagement, and this is what she looked like shortly before rising:
We hopped back in the Red Grand Caravan and zoomed back over to EPCOT while Aly drew pictures of robots made entirely of numbers. This morning, she was also drawing robots in the back seat, a “nervous girl robot named Reedo who thinks people will laugh at her because she looks weird” and “an angry boy robot named Rado.” Therapy, here we come! I told her that I was impressed with her drawing, and she said “Well of course Daddy, you’re awful at drawing.” Again, smart girl. Considerate, maybe not.
We somehow tricked Leah into the stroller and headed to the Land Pavilion (sound familiar?) for our dinner at the Garden Grill restaurant, a revolving restaurant with Farmer Mickey, Chip & Dale, and Pluto. Leah is currently obsessed with the Mickey characters, so we knew she’d have fun with this one. We were seated right away, and Leah spotted Mickey at another table a ways off and started waving and yelling “hi!” at him.
When Mickey came over, she was a little bit shy, but warmed up to him pretty quickly. The girls collected their autographs and got their pictures while enjoying some rolls with maple butter, while their parents ate a salad with mediocre dressing.
How to make a chipmunk angry
Leah’s seat put her in position to see the characters coming before the rest of us, and shortly after Mickey left, Leah let us know that Dale (of Chip and) was headed our way. Now, earlier in the day, I had mentioned something to Aly that might be fun to try tonight, but she was unwilling to do it and asked me to do it instead. So once Dale had arrived at our table and was signing an autograph for us, I said:
Aly, what are you talking about? I didn’t say that Dale was a squirrel! I know he’s a chipmunk
At which point Dale gave me a on-no-you-didn’t finger waggle, which absolutely killed Aly:
Aly was still cracking up:
If you’ve ever asked yourself, “Is submitting myself to rodent humiliation for the entertainment of my offspring a worthwhile value proposition?”, I can assure you that the answer is yes. Leah was also quite pleased to see Dale, and even gave him a high-five.
Then she returned to her real interest: mac & cheese.
Pluto came by for a visit, as did Chip, who played some hide-and-seek with Aly before I mentioned the whole squirrel thing again, much to Aly’s delight.
Dale kind of snuck up on Lele, which did not go very well:
Like the trooper that she is, Leah then recovered for a high-five exchange with Chip.
Then dessert showed up – berry cobbler thing for the grownups and chocolate cake cones for the wee ones. Leah dipped her finger in the chocolate frosting from her cone several times and then “painted” it onto Rachel’s arm. Aly and I got the giggles each time she did it.
We headed outside and started walking towards World Showcase, where the girls spotted a plain old duck that held their attention for five minutes. In this picture, Aly is holding a leaf out to the duck and saying “Here, ducky, come over and eat the bread”, and then I had to explain to her that lying to ducks will not get them to come over to you. Life lessons at DisneyWorld.
While walking through Canada, the father of a family walking by us said “This is why Americans think we all live in teepes and igloos.” As we wandered back through the UK, Aly announced that she wanted to hit a KIDCOT station and start a coloring project. We stumbled onto Tigger and Pooh in the back of the UK store with the KIDCOT station, and with a short line to boot, so we hopped on line (British of me, eh?) (sorry, corny jokes are hard to avoid after two hours of Hoop Dee Doo Revue last night) to see two of Lele’s current favorite characters. Our turn came, and Aly jumped right up to meet them and get autographs, while Lele looked on cautiously. Pooh came up to her quickly and tried to give her a kiss on the cheek, but she pushed him away with a forearm shiver, before relenting and deciding a high-five was okay.
Next we headed up the hill towards France (is there a Thin Red Line joke here somewhere?) and picked up our communicators to start the Agent P adventure mission. Aly picked “Agent A” as her agent name, and “Agent L” decided she also needed to have one of the cell phones to play the game, though as you can see below, she tired of it quite quickly. As they received their mission, the girls were encouraged to show their “agent pose”:
It took about an hour for Aly to complete the single Agent P mission, and she took it very seriously as she wandered around France. The phone told her to “get away where no one else can hear this message”, so she did:
Yep, that’s my kid, on the ground, behind a trash can at EPCOT. Pretty impressive followup to the ground laying action at Hollywood Studios yesterday, eh? Most of the time Aly was working on this, Leah and I were goofing around:
But at one point during the mission, I spotted Princess Aurora (also known as Sleeping Beauty to those of you without young girls) and asked Aly if she’d like to go see her and get an autograph. She said “No, Dad, I’m busy with Agent P right now.” While the three girls were off on Le Petite Rue hunting down Doofenschmirz, I took the empty double stroller and got in line to see Princess Aurora. By myself. When I got up to Aurora, I told her what Aly had said so I wanted a picture to surprise Aly with when we got back to the hotel. She thought that was a grand idea:
And none of them saw me do it, so I got to surprise them while we were going through the day’s pictures tonight. Aly kept punching me in the arm. 🙂
