Parenting Book Review: The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting

When I mentioned on my Craft Knife Facebook page that I was interested in learning more about parenting seen through the lens of game theory, one of the comments on my post was an impassioned rebuttal of using game theory to parent. The gist of the comment was that one's relationship with one's children should be collaborative, not competitive, and treating parenting as a win-or-lose scenario would be harmful to children.

That comment made me realize that many people don't understand what game theory is, which is a bummer, because game theory is AWESOME and fully relevant to a whole myriad of human interactions.

Game theory is essentially the study of strategic decision-making. So yes, it covers games and how to win them, but it also deals with how to achieve the optimal result whenever strategy is called for. And optimal result doesn't necessarily mean winning--if you want everyone happy, then that's your optimal result. If you want a fair allocation of Christmas presents or parental attention, then that's your optimal result. If you want your kid to grow up to be a good, honest, fair, friendly person, then that's certainly your optimal result!

So when I read The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting (I had my local university's library inter-library loan it for me!), I wasn't trying to win parenting, but to see if they had any strategies that would, say, get my kids to stop fighting, or help me figure out how to teach my kid who's also a lying liar who lies how to stop lying all the dang time.

There is a chapter on lying. Spoiler alert: there is no quick and easy strategy to get your kid to stop lying, dang it.

There are LOTS of ways, however, to make sure that you're treating kids fairly, and that's actually the part of the book that I enjoyed the most. The authors emphasize that of course fair does not mean equal--if you give your kids equal slices of a half-chocolate, half-vanilla cake, but the kid who only loves chocolate gets vanilla and the kid who only loves vanilla gets chocolate, then that's not fair. So the authors go through tons of different ways to divvy up resources, and you can read through them and utilize whatever appeals to you. Bigger families might like the auction approaches, but I have long been a heavy utilizer of the I Cut, You Choose school of choice-making.

You know that one. Whenever you give your kids or partner a list to choose from, whether it's chores or vacation destinations or movies for Family Movie Night, but you've made the list and so you're cool with everything on it, that's I Cut, You Choose. It's my favorite.

There's also a good chapter on how to best utilize punishments and rewards, if you use them. For one, don't make a punishment that punishes YOU as much as it does the kid--for instance, don't automatically ground your kid from the car if it means that you're just going to have to play chauffeur yourself. Instead, think about what has the most impact from the kid's point of view. If they're misusing the car, then, perhaps they should pay for their own insurance, or gas, or drive Meals on Wheels for a while. That kind of thing.

But even the punishment/reward chapter is more invested in social contracts than purely cause and effect. Like, not how to punish your kid, per se, but how to help her fulfill the social contract that she made to you concerning how she would use the car. The authors claim that pre-committing to the consequences help enforce this. It's why school sports programs have academic requirements, and everybody already knows what will happen if a kid violates them. So the authors encourage bringing another person into your contract: if one kid steals the other kid's water bottle one more time, tell them both that she can also do that kid's dishwasher duty that day. Now you have someone else to help you enforce the contract!

Lying is one of my kid's main faults. She's always been very bright, and very bright kids do have a tendency to become manipulative, or resort to lying, simply because they can often make it work to their advantage. Lying is a hard flaw to correct, and the authors would tend to agree with that, because they don't have any clear-cut solutions. They do, however, have one piece of advice that I've since taken to heart: ask LOTS of questions, and get lots and lots and LOTS of details. The idea is that lying requires mental and emotional labor. You have to think through your lie, and maintain it while knowing that what you're doing is wrong. So in every tempting scenario, ask lots of questions. Solicit LOTS of details. If the kid is telling the truth, then there's no extra mental or emotional labor involved in offering more information. If the kid is lying, then even if you don't catch her in her lie (which I often don't, because like I said, my kid is very bright), then you're still making her work a lot harder than she would be working if she was just telling the truth. Ideally, that labor will eventually become so costly that lying is no longer worth it.

I have been trying this one, and I think it's working. It's best if I do the questioning in ways that don't sound like I'm trying to catch her in a lie, because then she just doubles-down with her stubbornness and she'd die before she let me win when she's being stubborn, but asking lots of questions and eliciting lots of details, as well as having a reputation for checking in and following through (which, by the way, is EXHAUSTING if you think about how much you ask a teen and tween to do independently without you having to check that they've done every single thing), is at least better than screaming and frustration.

Why is my kid so feral? Sigh...

Other chapters, such as how to help your kids learn to get along, or how to encourage them to do their best in school, weren't as relevant to me, and I fully admit that the voting chapter got a little over my head, but overall, I highly recommend this book, most particularly if you, like me, seem to have at least one budding little manipulative game theorist of your own.

The Best Gifts for Nerdy Tween and Teen Girls

That just kind of says what it is, right? I mean, my girls are a tween and a teen, and they're pretty nerdy. They come by it honestly, at least. They're also TERRIBLE to shop for, with neither of them giving me ANY ideas for Christmas this year. That's so unhelpful that it's almost mean!

They do like some stuff, though, so if you, too, have a situation in which you, too, have a nerdy tween or teen girl and no idea what stuff they might like, here's a list of my kids' favorite stuff. Feel free to try some of this out on your own little nerd!

ComicBoxer Subscription and/or ComiXology Unlimited

You know that comics and graphic novels are the traditional havens for the nerdy tween/teen. Our whole family loves comics, and we read them often. One year I bought Matt a subscription to ComicBoxer, and the whole family got really into it, sitting around and watching him unbox each package when it came, hanging out the whole evening after and passing around everything that came in it, then waiting impatiently for new issues of our favorites to come out at the local comic shop or the collections to make it to our library.

ComiXology Unlimited is even better for the avid reader, because you've got at your fingertips access to a huge collection of comics, some complete sets and some ones that get you hooked on the series. The girls' uncle bought this for Will one birthday, and we haven't been able to do without it since.

Fair warning: comics are written for all maturity levels, and both of these services have comics that you might not want your kid to read.

Indie Comic Strip Prints

Along the same lines, but more directly supporting a real, live artist, there are SO many awesome comic makers out there who shill their own work by producing high-quality, signed prints. If your tween or teen is into anyone in particular, they will, I guarantee, LOVE a signed print of their own. I own several prints and collections created by Emily's Cartoons (she does My Life as a Background Slytherin), Syd treasures her signed Bill Amend print--

--and Will, too, follows a ridiculous number of science- and nerd-themed web comics.

Crocanana

Your kid probably doesn't want a boring old teddy bear. We first saw the Crocanana at a Comic Con, and both of my kids are OBSESSED with them. I don't pretend to understand the appeal--I think it's something that speaks uniquely to the tween and teen mindset--but hey, they're a small business that markets mostly at comic-cons. What's not to love about that?

Hatching Dragon Candle

You can also find a hatching dinosaur candle or a hatching unicorn candle, so there's one for everyone! I bought Will this hatching dragon candle for Christmas last year, and our whole family thinks that it's just about the most stinking cute thing ever. Will won't really burn it down to reveal the whole dragon, as a matter of fact, because she likes the look of the egg candle too much!

The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings Book Series

Start with The Hobbit, go all the way through the Lord of the Rings, and don't watch the movie until you've read the book! This series was our family read-aloud for years, and we just finished the final chapter of the final volume earlier this autumn. Tolkien's world is gorgeous and immersive, and while most kids have read a Harry Potter or two, if you're lucky YOU could be the one to introduce a kid to this, their other future great love in literature.

Lava Lamp

This is pretty old-school, but if you've got a kid who's not into whatever the trendiest thing is, then it's likely that they'll appreciate some old-school entertainment. Lava lamps are inexpensive and tend to be super sturdy; our family is still regularly using the one that I received as a present back when I was a teen, myself.

Not to mention: this thing is soothing as hell, and tweens and teens these days need all the anxiety relief that they can get!

Miniature Classic Nintendo

I don't normally do electronics as gifts for my kids, but this is another old-school classic that's worth the exception. Matt actually gave this to me for Mother's Day this year, because he knows me completely, and the kids have been super into playing with me. It's nice because video games are so complicated these days that this is just about the only kind that I can manage to navigate to play with the kids, and there's nothing that kids like better, even kids at the ripe old ages of 12 and 14, than to play with their parents!

Novelty Ear Headphones

This won't fit in with every little nerd's favorite interest, but if it works, then it really works! I mean, everybody needs headphones, so it's a practical gift, but headphones with cat ears or a unicorn horn, or earbuds with elf ears attached, are a pretty epic score for those who are way into fantasy.

Here, look at this:

That's my kid listening to an audiobook on her light-up cat ear headphones, while making an elaborate string art portrait of a unicorn. That's what I'm talking about.

Quirkle

We've loved this game since the kids were small, and we still love it--it's a family game night favorite. The idea is to make sets of shapes, and there's a lot of great strategy involved. It's especially nice because our visual thinker is naturally good at this game, while her usually more logic-minded sister has to work hard to keep up. Fun fact: we have NEVER kept score during this game, nor have the kids ever asked to. We try our best, of course, but when we're finished, we generally just admire the pretty patterns that we've made and then pick them up to play again.

Sculpey Polymer Clay

Like Perler beads (which aren't on my list this year, but are nevertheless hard favorites with my kids), Sculpey is a great nerdy gift not because of what it is, but because of what you can DO with it. I buy this specific set over and over again, and over the years, we've collected a few special tools and I sometimes stock up on larger packages of colors, but this set is the kids' favorite. Sculpey is dead simple to work with, and there are so many step-by-step tutorials to make everything under the sun on YouTube that you can't really mess it up. And you can make ANYTHING! Syd uses it more, and has made the most magical things with it--she recently finished making her Secret Santa in the ballet program an actual avatar of that actual kid in her actual Nutcracker costume, and it was epic--but even Will can follow a tutorial or her own imagination to make dragons and castles and unicorns, and my favorite piece of jewelry is a Sculpey tentacle pendant that I made using this exact tutorial, and I'm not an artist.

Tweens and teens who are very passionate about specific things often spend a lot of time immersed in that one thing, so this is a good way to engage them in a different kind of activity while still allowing them to indulge their obsessions.

Themed Craft Kits

These are along the same lines as the Sculpey, but for folks who need more guidance to create the nerdy artwork of their dreams. We own SO many of these--we've got Disney art kits, Marvel and Star Wars felt stuffie kits, Halloween and Star Wars origami kits, paracord crafting kits to indulge Will's military interests, Sherlock and Doctor Who coloring books, Harry Potter and Tolkien and Dr. Seuss cookbooks...

Whatever your kid is into, there is undoubtedly some fan art craft kit for them somewhere.

Tsuro

This tile-laying game is one of those board games that's easy to learn and impossible to master. The randomness of the draw, as well as the unpredictability of others' moves, means that even a novice can have luck on her side, but there's nevertheless tons of strategy involved, and the design of the game, itself, is gorgeous. Look at that dragon on the front of the box!

Women of NASA LEGO Set

If your girl is into STEM subjects, then she's probably a fan of at least one of these women of NASA. Mae Jemison, in particular, is super inspiring--the girls and I got to hear her speak at our local university a few months ago, and it was amazing!

A lot of this you can apply to whatever your kid is a nerd about. No matter passion, there's pretty likely some fan art of it, a craft book for it, a LEGO kit to build it, books or games themed around it, etc. With a little effort, your little nerd could find herself wearing themed pajamas, eating a homemade cake decorated to her thing, playing with a kit that's related to her theme, with something even nerdy on for background music. That's how you live the dream!

The Best Sneakily Educational Gifts for Tweens and Teens

You know you want to buy your kids educational gifts! It only works, however, if they don't KNOW that the gifts are educational, or if the gifts are so awesome that they don't CARE that they're educational!

These gifts, hits with my own tween and teen from previous holidays, are so awesome that the kids either didn't notice, or didn't care, how much they learned. It's a gift-giving best-case scenario!

Universal Yums

I bought this monthly subscription box for Will for her last birthday, and we all LOVE it. Every month she gets a box of snacks from a different country, with a pamphlet explaining them, giving facts about the country, etc. And then we get to eat the snacks! It's a great way to sneak a little extra geography into your life, because after eating weird food from a country, don't you want to look it up on the globe, find a bunch of YouTube videos about it, and check out Spotify to see what its Top 50 hits are?

We do!

Robotic Unicorn

Tweens and teens who are into unicorns, dragons, and other castles in the sky aren't always into robotics.

At least, they think they aren't. Just wait and see how excited they get when they've got a real, live (for a very specific definition of the word...) robotic unicorn of their own to program!

LED Circuit Stickers Journal

Your tween and teen get an interactive journal that teaches them how to add awesome special effects to their notes or school projects or greeting cards or private writing or artwork. At least, that's what they think they're getting.

They're actually getting a pretty good basic course in circuitry and electricity. Whenever it comes up next in school or life, they're going to be surprised to notice that they're already experts!

Flying Lesson

Yes, a REAL flying lesson! Will's grandfather gave her a certificate for a one-hour flying lesson for her fourteenth birthday, and it is the best gift that she has EVER received. She got to practice take-offs and landings and take turns flying an actual Cessna with her flight instructor, and she learned so much about aviation in just that one lesson, not to mention all the math and map reading and physical skills that she used.

Dwarf Houseplants

This might seem like a super weird gift, but bear with me. Whenever I buy from a seed catalog, I always let the kids look through it, too, and if want they want isn't too expensive or unsuitable for our property, I'll buy something for them. A couple of years ago, Syd picked out this dwarf pomegranate plant, and it has been the best thing ever! We haven't actually gotten it to bear us a completely ripe pomegranate yet, although we live in hope, but it's been endlessly entertaining for Syd to watch it, and she does reasonably well at taking care of it.

Since then, we've kept a lookout for other interesting dwarf houseplants that we can nurture. They can live outside in the summer and then come inside for the winter, but since they're dwarf varieties, they don't take up a ridiculous amount of space. And, of course, the kids get to care for them, observe them, learn about them, and enjoy them. It's hands-on science and practical life skills!

I think we're going for a dwarf banana plant next...

Create This Book

Syd loves this book both because one of her favorite YouTube stars created it, and because, unlike Wreck This Journal or most other similar creative artist's notebooks, you don't mess the book up AT ALL while you're making it. Instead, you end up with a completely adorable complete creation. Even tweens and teens who don't consider themselves artists will find lots of inspiring prompts to play around with. And you can keep going back to it endlessly, it seems--I bought this for Syd back in June, and she's constantly tweaking pieces or adding new ones or further embellishing it.

Constellations Memory

Memory might seem like a game that's too babyish for tweens and teens, but I assure you that it is not. Here's a photo of Will and I playing this exact Memory game a couple of nights ago, while Syd was playing with polymer clay (an item in my Nerdy Gifts for Tweens and Teens post) and Matt was reading A Christmas Carol aloud to us:

Because we're nerds. This particular Constellations Memory game, which we've had for years and which I often bring on road trips to play in our hotel room, has so many cards that it's very much a challenge even for adults (you can remove some of the cards to make the game easier, of course), and not only are the illustrations beautiful, but they also sneakily teach you the constellations. Curious folks can go on to explore more astronomy, Greek myths, or stargazing resources.

Color Yourself Smart Series

These coloring books are like the adult coloring books that tweens and teens like, BUT they're sneakily educational! Will completely immersed herself in the dinosaurs book after someone bought it for her for some holiday that I don't remember, but there's a whole series of them to explore.

Contemporary Craft Kits

I think everyone should know how to do a large selection of hand arts, especially sewing, but most beginner's craft kits shoot themselves in the foot by making the stuff that a beginner is learning to create so CHEEZY! 

It's very much worth your time to look for a how-to-crochet, how-to-cross-stitch, how-to-sew, etc., kit with contemporary theming. The kids still pull out this particular stitch-it kit that I have for cross-stitching, not because the patterns are necessarily anything special, but just because they're good contemporary patterns that don't look out of place.

For those who are a little more advanced, the craft kits get even more awesome. Check out this Stitch People kit!

Blokus

We found the travel version of this game at Goodwill years ago, and even though we later also bought the full-size version (also at Goodwill!), this travel version remains our favorite by far. It's terrific for logic, spatial reasoning, and math skills, but it's also easy to learn and quick to play. We've whiled away lots of time with this game on road trips or while waiting for various appointments and activities to end. 

These are some of our favorites, but I'm always on the lookout for sneaky educational stuff to put on Santa's list, so if you've got a favorite of your own, please let me know!

Thanksgiving in California: We spent Thanksgiving Day in Disneyland!!!

We spent 16 hours in Disneyland, that is, with a 1.5-mile walk between the park and our hotel on either side of it.

Here's our first day in California--at the beach!
Here's our second day in California--in San Diego!
Here's our third day in California--exploring Joshua Tree National Park!

And now we're at Thanksgiving Day, at approximately 6:15 am, eating motel breakfast with a handful of other Disney diehards (you can tell the Disney-goers because apparently there's a uniform. The kids commented several times throughout the day that just about everyone but us had on some sort of Disney gear--mouse ears of a million varieties, themed T-shirts and sweatshirts, princess dresses on the kids, sometimes entire themed outfits. If I'd known, I'd at least have had the younger kid save her Goodwill Goofy sweatshirt for this day!). In the past couple of months since I'd hatched our vacation plans, I'd spent at least a little bit of every day on the big Disneyland forum, reading tips and tricks and crafting my method of attack. That's why we were staying where we were: Disneyland is walkable from the surrounding neighborhoods, but the hotels that are across the street from the park entrance cost several hundred dollars more per nigh than the hotel where we were. We were at about the outer limit of walkability for our active family, but the night before I'd sent Matt to preview the route, and he'd found us a couple of shortcuts that were only slightly shady.

That's also why we were eating when we were: the main tenet of advice was to arrive at the park gate 45 minutes to an hour before it even opened, so by 6:30 am we were hiking, by 6:50 or so we were in Downtown Disney--

--by 7:00 or so we were at the front gates of Disney California Adventure--

--and by 7:40 or so we were actually inside the park, in line for Soarin!

I wanted to see as much of Disneyland as we could in one day, so I splurged on their MaxPasses. They were totally worth the money, because you could use it to pull FastPasses right on the Disneyland app, instead of having to walk over to a machine that might be at the far end of the other part, which means that as soon as the park opened for the day I could be walking through the line at Soarin' while choosing a FastPass for Radiator Springs Racer, and then right after we got off Soarin' we could ride Grizzly River Run (that's why we're wet in the next several photos), walk over there, sightseeing along the way, and be starting our ride 20 minutes later!

You can see Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout from the top of Radiator Springs--I'd just pulled a FastPass for that while in line for this!

I wouldn't wait in the 2+hour lines that I was seeing sometimes on the Disney app for this ride, but we were all super into it. It kind of has something for everyone--there's your basic dark ride, where you can see some of the characters pop out and they're cute, and then there's a part with excellent special effects, and a part where you split off and can get a different ride experience depending on your car, and a part where you race another group in their other car, and it's fast and thrilling but not too swoopy. Matt doesn't like roller coasters, but even he enjoyed this one.

MaxPass also includes all the PhotoPass photos for every photo taken in the park, which was a total bonus for us, because I've never in my life bought a ride photo. I don't know if I would have bought any of these, frankly--we are apparently not the kind of people who all make interesting, dramatic faces on rides--but still, they're fun to have:

I'd sort of thought that we might use the PhotoPass feature to take cute pictures of our whole family in front of the picturesque sites, but the line for every single one of those was LONG, and we mostly wanted to do all the rides we could, not get all the photos taken of us that we could. 

The younger kid and I had just watched Cars while Matt and the older kid were in California without us, so we appreciated all the theming in Cars Land:

Actually, all the theming overall was my favorite thing about Disneyland. I loved the eye for detail, and yes, the holiday decorations were pretty magical. I mean, those snowflakes are made from WRENCHES!!!

The younger kid is kind of a reluctant Ariel fangirl--we all agree that The Little Mermaid has a HORRIBLE message, but still! Mermaids!--so we had to ride Ariel's Undersea Adventure, even though it's just teerrrrrrribbbbble. Fortunately, its cheeziness was what made it super fun for us:

Then we rode Guardians of the Galaxy, which was my favorite ride and Matt's least favorite (I thought the effects were awesome and I'm super into free-fall rides, but that's Matt's most hated type of ride of all), and then Goofy's Sky School, which terrified the both of us equally but which the kids LOVED:

It is chicken-themed, though, so it does have that going for it. You can't completely hate a chicken-themed ride:

All those hairpin turns at the very edge of the track, though? SHUDDER.

The younger kid insisted on riding Grizzly River Rapids AGAIN, because we weren't wet enough, and then before lunchtime we were already walking out of Disney California Adventure (for a while)--

--and making our way to The Enchanted Tiki Room, sharing a Dole Whip while we waited for the next show:

The Dole Whip was on our must-have list, but none of us were super into it. Heathens, I know. The Enchanted Tiki Room also isn't, you know, incredible or anything, but it's one of my most vivid memories from my trip to Disney World as a little kid, and so I have to go every time and drag everyone else with me.

Disneyland was crazily more crowded than Disney California Adventure, and the park was kind of a mass of moving people by the time we made our way to our FastPasses for Matterhorn, which turned out to be the younger kid's favorite ride:

It wasn't my favorite, but it WAS really cool. The younger kid and I had watched lots of POV ride videos on YouTube (which is something that I highly recommend if you're at all interested in theme park rides, because many of them are extremely high quality and you really get a good idea of what the ride is like), so we already knew our favorite small details to look out for, like the scary peek at the abominable snowman on the lift and the quaint details in the ride queue that let you know it's one of the original Disneyland rides:

We had a little time to kill before our next FastPass, so we blew it waiting in line for Snow White's Scary Adventures (I wish we'd used that time on Peter Pan instead, because we never managed to get there):

Here's a nice detail of the Peter Pan ride, though--see the pirate ship weather vane?

It's still barely after noon at this point, so we have some time to bum around the castle, making wishes and such--

--before we join the mosh pit that is Tomorrowland, good lord:

Buzz Lightyear in Disneyland is WAY better than Buzz Lightyear in Disney World, for the simple reason that here, you can actually pick up your blaster so that you can actually aim it! Still, I work so hard to shoot everything in sight that I leave the ride and can never actually tell you anything that was on it. I do like Space Mountain in Disney World better, though. We all like Star Tours, and although I remember the submarines as Captain Nemo's, from Disney World--

--the kids still thought that they were pretty magical:

While we were in line for Finding Nemo, I used the Disneyland app to order lunch across the park, so when we were done all we had to do was walk over to Stage Door Cafe and pick it up!

We're eating corn dogs because, again, they came highly recommended, and the younger kid is a big corn dog fan. I thought mine was pretty greasy, and it took me both lunch and dinner to finish it. The younger kid's also took her two meals, but she gave it a much higher approval rating than I did:

I didn't have a plan for where to go to see the parade and when to get there, and this was a mistake, because if you don't make a plan in a place this crowded, you're going to be frustrated and disappointed. So I was frustrated and disappointed at our kind of crappy view, and how annoying and pushy-shovey the crowd was, but the kids didn't seem to notice and they enjoyed themselves, so mission accomplished, nevertheless:

It gets dark even earlier on the West Coast than it does here in Indiana--they must be misplaced in their time zone, too! So by the time we were heading over to our FastPasses for Haunted Mansion, it's already starting to get a little too dark for photos:

I love Nightmare Before Christmas, but eh, I didn't love the Nightmare Before Christmas overlay of Haunted Mansion. I guess if you go to Disneyland every year then a holiday overlay is a fun novelty, but I don't know if I'll ever go to Disneyland again in my life, and I would have preferred to see the classic version.

By the time the sun fully set and we'd ridden Jungle Cruise (the kids thought that it was great to ride it after dark, and it was good, but I think it would have been better in daylight), we had an hour until our FastPasses for Incredicoaster back at Disney California Adventure, and it was actually getting chilly enough, even for us Midwesterners, that Matt volunteered to run back to the motel and bring back more layers for everyone. This was noble of him, indeed, but also a factor is the fact that the kids and I were about to get on Splash Mountain, and all things considered, Matt would for sure choose a three-mile hike over this:

Although an hour later, he was a total trooper for this!

The Incredicoaster was almost... too long? I enjoyed it for a while, and then I was pretty sure that I was going to die. Seriously, it's a LONG ride!

This was our last ride in Disney California Adventure (I was still holding out hope that I could sneak onto Guardians of the Galaxy again, but it wasn't to be), so we did some sightseeing on Pixar Pier--

--until I got paranoid about finding a spot for the fireworks, having learned my lesson from the parade, and we walked back over to Disneyland for the rest of the night.

Finding a fireworks spot is almost as annoying as finding a parade spot. It's only a little better because you can see the fireworks from most of the park, but if you also want a castle view... well, good luck. If I had this trip to do again, I would have skipped the parade entirely, rode rides right up until the fireworks, and then found any old spot to simply see what I could see from where we happened to be. But what we did, instead, was find a decent spot to watch the fireworks, with the castle in front, and then attempt to guard that spot for the next hour. At first it was cool because everyone was sitting down. The older kid fell asleep for a while, as a matter of fact. But then people started to interlope and stand right in front of people who were sitting down, so everyone had to stand up and guard their spot better if they didn't want people to come and stand right in front of them. And then people just kept coming and coming, and the space got more and more crowded. People would say, "Excuse me," and want to push by you as if they were simply walking past, but then would push by you and stand right in front of you. The third time it happened to the younger kid I told her that she was to plant her feet and was forbidden to move from her spot, no matter what, and we just didn't move at all when people tried to push past us--if we had, we wouldn't have been able to see a thing even after holding our spot for an hour!

All that, and then when the fireworks finally started some grown-ass man in the very front of our space had to have three different strangers ask him to please hold down his giant Mickey head balloon so that all the humans standing behind him didn't have their entire view blocked by it. Come on, People!

Thank goodness that when the lights on the street finally dropped, the whole damn thing was so magical that it made up for all the crap we'd put up with trying to simply watch it in the first place. I didn't take many photos because I was, you know, watching it, but these are enough to give you the vaguest of vague ideas. Add more color and sound and cool things happening to the castle, and you'll sort of get the picture:

As soon as the fireworks were over we had to immediately go over to queue up for our FastPass of Fantasmic, and even though I was pretty sure I was going to pee my pants before it was over, THAT was how they should organize all their dang shows, because it was totally easy and worth it. When we'd walked over to Disneyland that morning, we'd pulled FastPasses for the 10:30 showing of Fantasmic, and as the fireworks were over at about 9:45, we immediately walked over and got corralled into a holding area for just our FastPass group. If we had it to do again, I'd have picked up a late dinner so we could have killed some time eating while we waited, but then I'd have drunk more of my water bottle and I probably really would have peed my pants.

Anyway, after they'd cleared out the crowd from the first Fantasmic viewing, we got herded through into the FastPass viewing area, where we had to sit and stay seated through the show. See, because if everyone is sitting, everyone can SEE!!! It wasn't amazingly comfortable to sit on the ground as a big ole' adult, but thoughts of the great view we'd have comforted me, and marveling at this couple who was keeping their BABY awake to watch the show kept me scandalized enough to stay awake, myself.

And Fantasmic? WAS SO COOL!!! We hadn't seen the whole thing at Disney World, because they stopped the show when it started to rain, and I'd been well ready to go back to our condo by then, but this time, I was amazed. We had a perfect view, the effects were incredible, I was super impressed at how they'd rerigged the Sailing Ship Columbia and reused the steamboat, and there was even a dragon:

It was so. GOOD.

I mentioned that the younger kid and I watched a lot of POV ride videos. Actually, our whole family watched a ton of Disney videos, and even after we got home we watched some to see stuff that we'd missed in the park, or aren't currently running--thanks to YouTube we're all obsessed with World of Color, and we've never even seen it in person. Honestly, I preferred watching the parade on YouTube after we got home to trying to crane my neck past rude tourists to see some of it in person, and with the fireworks show, you can see other aspects that weren't in your line of sight in person. But if you've never seen Fantasmic before and you think that you might possibly go to a Disney park someday and watch it in person, DON'T watch it on YouTube! It's so good that it's not worth spoiling it ahead of time.

Thankfully, by 11:00 pm the park had cleared out a LOT, and we got more rides ridden in that last hour than we'd gotten ridden in our first hour. We had a FastPass for Indiana Jones, which turned out to be one of our favorite rides--it's crazy bumpy, like, you drive over boulders and stuff, but if you catch a glimpse of another vehicle on the track you can see that all the wheels are always on the track, and it's the chassis that is going crazy jolting you around. It's also computer-controlled, so every ride is slightly different. Then we rode Pirates of the Caribbean, which is VERY different from the Disney World version, and a lot longer, too, and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and at 11:45 pm, I realized that if we didn't book it over to It's a Small World, we'd miss it entirely.

It's a Small World was my Mammaw's favorite ride. God, I miss her. I couldn't miss this ride.

So we booked it!

Mammaw would have loved the lights. The younger kid really enjoyed the outside, too--she'd taken an Outschool class on the art of Mary Blair a couple of weeks before this, on purpose because I thought she'd appreciate seeing her work in person afterwards. And she did!

I know I just complained about Haunted Mansion Holiday, but the holiday version of It's a Small World is awesome. Whereas I could probably ride the Haunted Mansion every day happily, Mammaw or not, I've probably seen It's a Small World plenty of times, and the Christmas songs in the different languages were very sweet and cool. It's also, like, a 15-minute ride, though, so by the time we exited, we'd been in the parks for over 16 hours, and Disneyland was finally closed.

Which just meant that I could finally take some photos on the way out that didn't have five billion other people in them!

Mind you, we still had a 1.5 mile walk from the park entrance back to our hotel. I was pretty well dragging, but the kids were actually doing fine, and there were still enough people around for the whole walk that it didn't feel perilous, even after midnight. We also had our minds taken off our feet by watching the train wreck that was another couple walking along with us and very loudly breaking up while doing so. We analyzed this couple the whole trip back home the next day. Okay, he was dressed casually, like you would for a day at Disneyland. She was dressed up, though, in a fancy outfit and high heels, completely inappropriately for a trip to a theme park. So you might think she was wrong, right? That she hadn't dressed for the occasion and was cranky and cold and it was her own fault? But what if he didn't even tell her where they were going that day? What if he just said he was taking her out, and she wanted to dress up nice for him, and then he takes her somewhere where she's going to be miserable in her outfit? They were clearly local, because the accusations he was screaming at her all sounded like townie stuff. And they did sound kind of bad, but he was the one screaming them in a public place, which is highly uncool. And he was swearing. At her. In front of my children. This, in my opinion, automatically makes him in the wrong no matter what she did and what she told her dad about him and what her sister said. She didn't look like she needed rescuing or anything, but I was VERY upset on her behalf. I hope that jerk is far behind her now.

As if the couple was a minor bit of foreshadowing, we, too, were all very cranky on our long, early flights home the next day--like, SO cranky. So VERY cranky. I have so many stories about the crankiness and unhappiness that ensued, but you probably don't want to hear about how pissed I was to have to sit between two strange men for four hours when somehow Matt scored an aisle seat two rows away, AND my TV screen thingy didn't work so I couldn't finish watching Oceans 8 while I could clearly see Matt watching Marvel movie after Marvel movie all stretched out in the aisle, and then in DFW the older kid almost walked off the tram into a random terminal and then acted like Matt was attacking her when he grabbed her back and a total stranger offered to call the police to assist her, and then in Indy the worst couple ever sat on the other side of the aisle next to Matt and when we disembarked the guy totally cut in front of Matt to get off, then Matt went, then when I tried to shuffle the kids and myself off after him the woman made this big comment about how she'd been cut off from walking with her husband so I let her go in front of me even though that meant that she was cutting me off from walking with my husband but whatever it's not a big deal, at which point she walked as slowly as ever-loving molasses while the kids and I, for whom it was something like 3 am, lost our minds behind her, and her husband was waiting right at the end of the plane for her, it's not like he was on Mars, and they both proceeded to walk as slow as a human can walk up the gangway, TAKING UP THE WHOLE GANGWAY so nobody could pass them, and by the time we finally made it up to the gate Matt was pissed at ME because good lord, how can it take me that long to get myself (and two exhausted kids and all our stuff) off the plane, and so I sent him ahead to get the car from long-term parking while I got the luggage, but for fuck's sake I forgot to give him the exit ticket so the kids and I had to get the luggage by ourselves and ride the damn bus out to him, anyway, with our fifty-pound suitcase and nobody, on either side of the airport, was happy about that.

Traveling home from a fun trip is always the worst--I still remember the time that I accidentally caused an international incident in a Switzerland airport, I was so exasperated--but that's kind of a good thing, isn't it? Because if your trip home wasn't miserable, then maybe you wouldn't notice how quiet your house is when you walk in, and how comfy your bed is, and how nice your cats are, and how quick your internet is, and how happy your doggy is to see you. 

Because we LOVED this Thanksgiving trip to California, but we sure were relieved when we got home!