Disney Day #4: One Day in Magic Kingdom, and our YES Program Class

Although we'd been loving all our days at Disney, I, personally, had been looking forward to our YES Program class the most, and our time in Magic Kingdom. Our class, How Things Move, met at the Magic Kingdom entrance 45 minutes before the park opened, and so I was excited about seeing the park for the first time before its official opening, and I was excited to see what Disney-style education entails.

Only one parent is permitted to accompany their children to a YES Program class, so Matt dropped me and the girls off bright and early, and then headed back to the condo to sleep and swim (he was supposed to do laundry, but since no laundry actually got done, I can only assume that this is how he spent his morning?). We said goodbye to him, walked up the ramp, and then got our first experience on...

...the monorail!!! If we ever drive through Orlando again (likely) without going to Disney World (also likely), I will set aside an entire afternoon simply to ride the monorail. It's made of fun.

Our YES Program class was also VERY fun, and so educational and inspiring that I really wish that we'd taken it on the first day of our trip, instead of the next to last. Our instructor, a Disney teacher who specializes in working with this specific age group (and you could tell!), escorted us to a before-hours Main Street and spent a few minutes having the children point out to her all the things that were moving. When all the children seemed engaged and their answers started becoming more creative and sophisticated, she walked us back to Fantasyland, asking us to notice as many more things that were moving as we could on the way. We sat in the shade of the teacups ride while the children shared the things that they'd noticed (Water! Horse and Carriage! Flags on Cinderella's Castle! Dumbo!), then led them to think about what made each of these things move--that's its source of energy!

To get the kids' minds focused specifically on mechanical energy sources, we all rode The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, again observing things that moved, this time also trying to envision their source of energy. Then, our instructor talked about several mechanical sources of energy, specifically solar (She brought out a small solar-powered car for the children to play with in the light and the shade), air (We rode Dumbo, and learned to recognize that specific sound that signals pneumatic power), electricity (demonstrated by a battery-powered circuit), gravity (We rode Goofy's Barnstormer twice in a row without having to get off!), and magnetism (which powers the PeopleMover, we learned as we rode it; in other news, I was stunned when Willow was able to easily explain to the class how a magnet works--yay, magnetism unit study!). 

Although I would never want to have the class (or any other class, as a matter of fact) take place outside the Disney park, a Disney park is VERY distracting to attend a class inside. It helped vastly that our instructor was excellent, and really good at keeping young children focused (the value of a simple hand on a distracted child's shoulder as one speaks can never be overestimated!), but nevertheless, would YOU pay attention to a short lecture on energy sources when just across the sidewalk a million Disney characters are emerging from a hidden gate and heading off to their various stations before park opening?!?

Clearly, this Momma couldn't! And, of course, our instructor didn't expect any of the 5-8-year-olds to, either, so we all waved and yelled hello, and then, during the first break in traffic, she subtly herded us somewhere a little quieter.

When it was time to do some designing, our instructor took us to a restaurant that wasn't open yet, and there we had tons of room, plenty of quiet, empty bathrooms(!!!), and air conditioning to hang out in while the children worked hard to design their own rides, also thinking hard about what energy sources should power them. Willow designed a double-inversion roller coaster (she talks big talk, for a kid who wouldn't even ride Space Mountain!), and Sydney got a lot of praise from the instructor for the details that she drew into her roller coaster that goes in and out of a mountain, at the top of which is a fire-breathing dragon:

I also must say that I found our instructor's habit of referring to the children as "future imagineers" SO refreshing, considering that, for the past three days, basically everyone who works at Disney had been calling my girls "princess." Mind you, I knew already that Disney was a den of gender heteronormativity, but it got very wearisome to hear from two perspectives, the first as the mother of a very gender-conscious girl who sees the princess thing as a license to put on high heels, lipstick, and dresses that tangle you up when you try to run around and climb trees, and the second as the mother of a very butch girl who sees the princess thing as yet another way in which she is inexplicably different from seemingly every other little girl in the world. 

The girls and I talked about this a LOT, discussing archetypes and consumerism and the fun of fantasy play and stereotypes and gender heteronormativity, and coming up with a list of other things that CMs could call children (Pirate! Your Highness! Mouseketeer! Imagineer!), but I also invented a game for them to play:

You probably can't understand her, because part of the fun is how difficult the phrase is to say, but the gist of the game is that whenever a Disney CM called one of my children "princess," that child would turn to me a few seconds later (ideally, after the Disney CM was no longer in earshot) and say, "I object to their sexist hegemony!"

I wanted the children to notice when they were being typecast, and to remember each time that I don't approve of stereotyping, but in a way that remained playful for them. For myself, it reminded me each time that I could allow my children the fun of the Disney experience without giving in to any values of which I don't approve. You'd be surprised at how many of my friends have given me flack about taking my kids to Disney World, but I stand by my assertion that I can let my children enjoy Disney World without letting them internalize consumerism or sexism. I can let them spend all their own money on all the crap they want without letting them think that they HAVE to have any of it. I can let them have fun going on rides and meeting characters without letting them watch most of the movies upon which those rides and characters are based (and the kids don't seem to notice either way!). I can let them love the princesses without letting them believe that they, themselves, have to be princesses to be loved. We can enjoy the fantasy that Disney World sells without letting it own us, and I think we did a good job at that.

In our class, the children also worked together in teams with tubing and marbles to design their own gravity-powered ride, and they learned a bit about how a ride is brought to life from a design, but the best part of this class was how, even after we were dismissed and off to spend the rest of our day riding rides and seeing shows and watching parades and meeting characters, the children always had it in their minds to think about the energy source behind everything. For the next two days, Matt and I would often hear something from the kids like, "I bet there's a hidden car driving that parade float," or "We're floating! This ride must be powered by moving water!".

As far as Magic Kingdom as a whole goes, if there was a ride, we rode it. If there was a show, we watched it. And then we did it again!

Prince Charming's Regal Carousel

We rode it twice!

Haunted Mansion--we rode this one twice, too.

Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin--we didn't really like the aiming system on this ride, so we only rode it once.

We figured out that we could drop Syd+parent off at the entrance to Space Mountain, then take Willow to ride the PeopleMover; the PeopleMover is a longer ride, but it takes longer to walk the miles of queue to ride Space Mountain, and so we almost always got off our respective rides and met up at the exact same time!

Sydney, in some combination of parents or other, rode Space Mountain probably six times, and possibly more; Will rode the PeopleMover about that many times. We saw PhilharMagic, rode Peter Pan once, It's a Small World Once, Goofy's Barnstormer a couple more times, Dumbo once more, Pirates of the Caribbean at least three times in a row, saw The Enchanted Tiki Room (Matt perennially teases me about the Tiki Room, because I've had that song stuck in my head my entire life, and first sung it to him probably 16 years ago), and Splash Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, both of which Willow actually consented to ride!

Off and on when entering a ride queue, one of these was scanned and handed off to us:

We'd give it back to the CM who helped us onto the ride itself, and I noticed them scan it immediately upon receipt--my theory is that they're timing our exact wait time and comparing it to the wait times listed at each ride's entrance (most of which vastly overestimated the wait times--even when a wait time was listed at 20 minutes, we often just walked right onto the ride). 

The kids ate even more ice cream--

--and we had a great spot for the afternoon parade:

Nevertheless, it was nice to know that we had two days in Magic Kingdom, and so to feel perfectly entitled to spend an hour or so goofing around Tom Sawyer's Island--

--and to hang out for nearly that long by the Sword in the Stone, eating sandwiches and watching people fail to pull the sword from the stone and, of course, trying our luck ourselves:

That thing was STUCK!

The girls had plenty of their own Christmas and birthday money to buy their own souvenirs, but I had a couple of things in mind that I'd budgeted to buy them myself, too. The kiddos spend almost all of their playtime playing with little people and animal figures, so I let them each pick out a Disney-themed figure set (Will has never played with hers, preferring to play with the remote-controlled time machine that she bought with her own money, but don't worry, Sydney plays constantly with BOTH sets!), and a gigantic, elaborate, ten dollar Mickey balloon: 

Magic Kingdom closed at 7:00, and it was the perfect closing time--the kids ate their packed dinners off and on throughout the afternoon, finishing them up on the ride back to the condo, then swam for a while, got ready for bed, and were sound asleep at the perfect time to wake up well-rested and ready for another day of Magic Kingdom in the morning.

It was particularly important to be well-rested, because the next morning, we were going to have breakfast with the princesses!

Disney Day #3: Animal Kingdom

Animal Kingdom was originally on my itinerary as a park to possibly skip--I'd heard that it was the smallest, and had the shortest hours, and so my thinking was that if we didn't get to everything that we wanted to see in Hollywood Studios or EPCOT, we could always return to one of those for a second day and simply omit Animal Kingdom.

I'm glad that I didn't omit Animal Kingdom, because this turned out to be Willow's favorite park!

For my part, I don't know how I could ever have contemplated skipping a park that has a Dino Land:

We rode Dinosaur four times--

--the kids rode Primeval Whirl and Triceratops spin a couple of times, and Willow decided that the Boneyard playground was basically the best playground that she's ever been to. It has dino bones!

I really liked the fact that the queues for the major rides were actually walks through themed museums, with fascinating artifacts to stop our racing through miles of empty queue to look at:

All the rides, the safari and the train trip and Kali River Rapids and Expedition Everest (which Sydney managed to ride THREE times, once with the family, once with just me, and once with just Matt)--

--were so fabulous and lots of fun, but Animal Kingdom also had what turned out to be my favorite show, The Festival of the Lion King. 

Why was it my favorite show, you may ask? Well, it has great costumes, with the dancers dressed like animals--

This monkey dancer pissed Sydney off by stopping to pick bugs out of her hair and eat them.

 --and it was truly engaging--

--AND we got our day's short rain shower while we were inside, so that we missed it almost entirely, but my real  reason for having this particular show as my favorite is that my kids? Were all OVER it!

The show was pretty full, but not overcrowded, and as soon as the doors to the auditorium were closed a CM walked over to us and asked if we'd like to sit in the Reserved seating, on a bench right in front on the stage floor. Um...yeah! Then, when our emcees and main characters came out and introduced themselves, one of them came over and asked the girls if they'd like to help her. Um...yeah!

They got pulled out again to help in the finale:

How cool is that?!?

Matt and Willow never had a hard day at Disney. Syd had her hard day at EPCOT the day before. This day, though, was my hard day. I often don't sleep well, and I was up for hours the night before (I finished up Dearly Devoted Dexter, and got well into The Water Wars); I was exhausted, and I had a headache. I really liked the shows because they were air-conditioned and I could sit on a nice bench and watch them--

--and I really liked the rides because they were also cooling (sometimes that cooling was from big splashes of water!) and again, I could sit down.

The walking around and sight-seeing, however--

--was really more of a trudge on my part, and although the rest of the family was quite happy to hang out in rain gear and eat their lunches and wait for the afternoon parade that was a little delayed by the sprinkle--

Do you recognize our rain gear from Niagara?

--I really just had my game face on and that was about it. I have, therefore, never appreciated strangers like these engaging Disney CMs more. One particularly fabulous CM, who, as she was clearing the parade path must have heard me tell the girls three times to stop splashing water on my jeans (puddles, ya know), each time with a little more edge to my voice, came up to them just as they were about to splash me for the fourth, sanity-breaking, time, and said, "My lovely little ladies! That filthy water is not for stomping in and splashing your beautiful mother!" Do YOUR kids obey strangers much more readily than they obey you? Mine do!

Another CM, walking the parade route as well, stopped to entertain the girls by asking them what their favorite animal was. Upon hearing their answer (T-Rex, of course!), she did a T-Rex dance for them!

I, personally, was quite impressed by her short arms and two-fingered hands.

Of course the parade was WELL worth the wait:

Willow bought some great toys for herself in this park, a remote-controlled time machine and an absolutely huge carnotaur, both from the Dinosaur ride gift shop. I did NOT purchase this warm Wookie hat:

Nevertheless, the 5:00 closing time was just what I needed. We headed back to the condo, Matt took the girls swimming while the chicken strips and French fries baked, we all ate a nice dinner together, got the kids ready for bed early, then let them watch a movie on the DVD player in their room while Matt and I went swimming, all by ourselves.

By the time we set our alarm even earlier for our next day at Magic Kingdom--and our homeschool class!--I was feeling MUCH better.

And I slept great, hallelujah.

Disney Day #2: EPCOT

One of the sadly inevitable facts about my children is that they do not sleep in. Well, Syd seems to have the potential to sleep in, but the sadly inevitable fact about her is that she shares a room with her sister, and her sister always wakes her up. Therefore, no matter how late we may have gotten in after Fantasmic the night before, when the alarm went off in the master bedroom at 7:15 the next morning, Matt and I trudged sleepily into the living room to find both girls wide awake, watching Disney Junior (yay for condo cable!) and eating leftover frozen pizza.

That inability to sleep is what makes me worry that the girls are not well-rested after a late night, but it does make getting to EPCOT by its 9:00 am opening, Hot Pockets in three hands (I still think they're gross!), travel coffee mug in the remaining hand, classic Disney songs playing on the ipod hooked into the car stereo, MUCH easier:

EPCOT is the one park in which, even with absolutely zero lines for even the most popular attractions like Soarin'--

--I left at the end of the night feeling like there was a lot of stuff that we simply didn't get to. It's a big park, for one thing, and some attractions close early (we missed out on "Captain EO" and "Journey into Imagination with Figment", which closed two hours before the rest of EPCOT), but there are also so many OTHER things to do in EPCOT that you could probably meander and browse and sight-see happily for a week without getting bored.

For instance, EPCOT is character heaven!

Mary Poppins

Snow White

Tigger and Pooh

It was in this park that, to my surprise, both girls got REALLY into meeting the characters. After carefully watching other children's encounters, Willow used some of her spending money to buy herself an autograph book, too, but even without it, with just hugs and hand-shaking, character encounters were so engaging for everyone! I knew that the princesses and other "face" characters would carry on small talk with the kids, and that was really cute to watch, but I had no idea how interactive the costumed characters would be, too. Everyone was completely delighted by every character that we met, and we met a lot!

In the past both girls have had trouble answering even simple questions on the fly when conversing with strange adults (Willow is notorious for answering, when asked what grade she's in or what school she attends, "I don't go to school"). After our first Disney day, when I saw how engaging everyone at Disney is, I actually drilled the children on their ages, their home state, their schooling situation, and their grades (When I first did this, Sydney said that she was from Arkansas and was a kindergartner, and Willow had to think about how old she was, sigh). One of the really unexpected results of our Disney trip is that both girls are now very good at answering these questions, and introducing themselves, and thanking someone when complimented, etc. My shining moment was when Snow White asked Willow what school she attends.

"I homeschool," said Will.

"Oh, you must be very smart!" said Snow White.

"I am," Willow replied.

We had lunch reservations at Les Chefs de France, which Matt had wanted to try. I had expected the food to be more French, I suppose, or maybe just to have more French options, but the adults' quiches and Willow's flounder were quite tasty (as were Sydney's pasta and chicken strips, after she refused to order anything French)--

--and Les Chefs de France is also special because it's the restaurant that Remy, the rat from Ratatouille, now cooks at. Why, yes, we DID meet him! 

One of the waiters rolls him around on a serving cart to greet diners, and although Remy was pretty darn cute, this waiter was way funny.

I was too close to get Sydney and Remy in the same frame, but here she is interacting with him. Just look at the expression on her face!

In the World Showcase, both girls got really into Kidcot, a free program that lets kids color a big cardboard bear on a stick and then take it around to the Kidcot tables in all the other countries to get it stamped. In many of the countries, the docents would also write the child's name in the language of their country on the bear, or draw their country's flag on it. I would have vastly preferred if the Kidcot locations had always been in the cultural areas of each country--

Morocco

 --rather than mostly in the indoor mall area of each country, which meant that, in my opinion, we spent WAY too much time in gift shops, but the kids LOVED the program, and Willow even insisted on spending part of our evening going partway back around the World Showcase, to get stamps from the couple of countries that we'd passed before starting Kidcot.

Sydney did a lot of shopping in the World Showcase. I saw a lot of stuff that I'd like to buy, but managed to abstain--I actually came out under budget for souvenirs, if you can believe it, never finding the perfect giant coffee mug for myself, and spending less on the couple of souvenirs that I'd planned to treat the girls to than I thought that I'd spend.

 There aren't as many rides in EPCOT as in the other parks, so we rode them all--Spaceship Earth, Living with the Land (we rode this one with only one other family, who seemed profoundly unamused at our delight with the ride--"Look, cotton bolls! Papaya! Ooh, giant chard!"), Soarin' three times, The Seas with Nemo and Friends twice for Syd and Matt (Willow flatly refused to ride it a second time, and I was happy to accompany her to the aquarium instead), Mission: Space once without spin and once for Matt and the girls with spin (spinny rides make me vomit, so I window-shopped instead), the Gran Fiesta Tour Starring the Three Caballeros, and Maelstrom, which I do believe wins the award for most rides. We all rode it three times in a row, then Matt and Syd rode it another three times while Syd and I did Kidcot--they'd only planned to ride it once more, but they couldn't refuse the CM's invitation to keep jumping back on board through the exit, since there was no wait for the ride. Throughout our entire Disney trip, the only thing that we got sick of was retracing our steps through seemingly miles and miles of empty queue every single time we wanted to re-ride a ride.

 Overall, I think that The Seas was our favorite building--

--and we probably could have spent most of our EPCOT day there. The kiddos LOVED the aquarium--

--and we ALL adored Turtle Talk with Crush. I wish that I'd prepped the girls ahead of time with questions for him, but still, you should have seen their faces when he swam down, looked right at them, and said "Hello, little dudes." 

This day was Sydney's hardest day, mostly because, although she liked all the sight-seeing, she really just wanted to go on rides, and so there were a couple of tantrums to help break up the day, and a couple of benches upon whom I'm sure hers was not the first time-out to be held. 

Nevertheless, even though it was late, both kids perked way back up for IllumiNations, which, you probably don't want to hear, I found enjoyable, but not necessarily impressive enough to warrant the late night and the standing at the edge of the lagoon for half an hour, etc. This was the only park that we really walked around in the dark in, though, which was an additional adventure for my kids who all summer have been going to bed while it's still light out:

They were happy enough to hop into their own beds at the end of it, though, and here's what I saw when I went into their room to kiss them goodnight:

Two kids, sound asleep, ready for Animal Kingdom in the morning!