Leah, as part of her campaign for 2011 Goudie Baby of the Year, blessed us by sleeping until 7:30, which meant I didn’t have to freeze my arse off taking her around the Boardwalk this morning – it was 38 degrees or some such silliness. We got all our stuff packed up and I took our luggage to the car while the girls checked me out (of the hotel, you lechers) and then I met them at Kouzzina for breakfast.
Kouzzina is Iron Chef Cat Cora’s Mediterranean restaurant right on the Boardwalk, and breakfast was great. I had a tasty skillet breakfast, Aly had her first Mickey pancake of the trip (and bacon that she kept dipping in butter), and Leah ate some apple slices. On the way out, we spotted Andrew Luck with a Stanford teammate and some AD folks waiting to be seated. Kinda fun.
It was still quite chilly and there was a cold breeze of about fifteen as we made the walk into EPCOT. We passed a wedding out on a deck along the lake, and felt bad for the bridesmaids in their sleeveless dressed in the 35-degree wind chill. Oh well, they’ll be hammered soon enough I’m sure, so the cold won’t matter.
Aly was anxious for another turn on Test Track, so she and I headed over there while Rachel got some Soarin fast passes and put Leah down for her first nap. The TT line was much shorter today, but wouldn’t you know it, the ride broke down again right when we were at the front. We still waited only about twenty minutes total, which isn’t bad, and Aly loved it as usual.
We met sleeping Leah and headed over to the Mexico pavilion to do some more Duffy coloring (Aly loves the KidCot activities) while Leah finished her nap. I stayed outside in a quiet spot with the stroller and took some pictures of the Mexico temple. Well, it was quiet for about ten minutes, until some mom decided to park her stroller about ten feet away so she could literally screech at her one year old. I tried to knock her down with stink eye, but my powers were too diminished after the weather of the night before, so screeching mom escaped unscathed. The screeching woke Leah up, as you can see in the confused stroller picture. Woke up happy though!
Leah and Rachel headed over to the baby center while Aly finished up coloring, then we headed to Club Cool for some more free pops from around the world. As I was walking in, I passed a mom lifting her four-ish years old boy up onto a wall next to a trash can, and telling him to “lean way into those bushes, that’s right, there you go.” Yep, in DisneyWorld, where there is always a bathroom within 62.5′, this lady lifted her kid onto a four foot high wall so he could pee in the garden. I was so irritated that I came back out and took a picture of the location, just to the left of this trashcan:
There are like ten bathrooms within a one-minute walk from this spot (the black circle is where this leaning incident took place). People, sheesh.
We spotted Rafiki all by himself, so Aly got a couple pics and an autograph.
While Rachel and Aly rode Soarin, LeLe and I once again visited the Nemo seagulls, and she hollered at them again, and did her twittering laugh at them as well. I love that twittering laugh. We made our way to the England KidCot station, some more Duffy coloring, and them headed back to the Boardwalk to get our car and make the move over to Bay Lake Tower.
We entered the main lobby of the Contemporary to check in, and Leah entertained the lady working the desk, and another cast member (Carl from Wilkes-Barre) came up to Aly and started talking to her about pin trading. We hadn’t gotten her started on that yet, since she’s just now becoming an autograph hound, and we’ve never been pin traders. Carl goes on to tell her that each cast member is allowed to pick one special person per day that they can give a pin without taking one in trade, and that he was picking Aly, so she could pick any one of his pins. She of course took forever to decide, but eventually picked one and Carl said, wait, there more, and he’d be right back. He brought over a certificate that he filled out for her, and then pulled out his notebook of special people and recorded her under today’s date. For my fellow skeptics, yes, I looked, and she was the only one for today and there was only one name for every day.
We headed over to our room, and we were all impressed with the new Bay Lake Tower. Our room is pretty swanky, though it does kind of suck to be on the first floor of a tower. That’s when Aly’s behavior began to rear its ugly head again, and I warned her that I was tired and I would not put up with any more attitude, or I would take her right out of the park and make her go back to the hotel. After Leah woke up from her nap, we made the eight-minute walk to Magic Kingdom, got through security (hah! Fooled em agin!), and made our way back to it’s a small world and got in line. Aly started jumping around, banged her wrist on my camera, and lost it – calling me mean, a liar, and saying I hurt her. I gave her a few chances to calm down, and you can guess how that went. So the three girls rode iasw while I looked up five year old behavior tips on my phone. And then we left MK, because I was at my wit’s end, and I was done with five year old tantrums. Another wasted trip into MK, which is too bad, because it was a decent night, not too crowded, and the parade and fireworks were early enough tonight that we could have seen them and still gotten the girls to bed. We even had fast passes to meet Mickey and several princesses that went to waste.
This has really been a tale of two trips – the parts where Aly has “been a shit”, as my mom used to say about me with some regularity – sorry mom, but it’s true, you did say that about me a lot, and I’m sure deservedly; and the parts where we’ve been able to have fun as a family, where Aly has had lots of fun. Leah’s been pretty easy the whole time, and really seems to have enjoyed the trip, so it has been worth it overall.
PS – I’ve down all of this blogging from my iPad, and the WordPress app seems to out the pictures in somewhat random order when I post through the app. That’s why they’re a bit whacky.
