Best Kid Ever

In the last couple years I have come to appreciate my son's enthusiasm for travel and other things. Last year we stayed at an airport hotel before leaving on a trip to Disney World. My son declared it "the best hotel ever!" (At least until we got to the Animal Kingdom Lodge at WDW!)

This summer on vacation, we got a room with a hide-a-bed so he could have his own space in the room. Even better, it was in a part of the room with a TV, so he could lay in bed and watch a movie. He was reluctant to leave and declared it the "best bed ever."

We recently had our bathroom remodeled. After his first shower in the new tub, he announced it was the best shower ever. A meal he likes? The best ever. A book he enjoyed? The best ever.

After getting to meet an author he likes, I asked him, "Wasn't that cool?!"
     "No."
     "What?!"
     "It was AWESOME!!"

I love his enthusiasm for life and his appreciation of new experiences. It's easy, as an adult, to take things for granted because I've experienced several versions of the same thing. A hotel bed is a hotel bed. But my son is a joy to take places (Well, most of the time. He can be a pill on occasion.) because if he enjoys himself, he really enjoys the experience - telling stories and asking questions about it for weeks and months to come.

I hope he keeps this attitude and appreciation and excitement for these experiences. It's endearing, and as a parent, it makes doing the big vacations and the special events worthwhile because we can enjoy the experience as a family and know he really appreciates the opportunities.

Vacation Observations

One more post about our vacation and I'll move on (probably!)

This was our third trip to Florida with our primary destination being Disney World. This time we did two days off-site - one for Legoland and the other for Universal Studios. Here are some of my observations about our trip.

*We splurged on our hotel this time around (we usually go cheap and stay at an All Star resort at Disney - and have had great experiences there) and stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge and got a room with a view of the savannah. It was well worth the expense. Our weather was nice enough that we could sit on our little balcony and watch the animals and just relax. The hotel does have some nice viewing spots if you want to stay there but don't want to spring for a room with a view.
*Since my son was old enough to not need a nap on this trip, we got tickets for Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party and the Candlelight Processional, two evening events. They were fun, and I'm glad we did them, but I'm not sure they would be "have to" activities next time.
*On the one day we started at Disney Hollywood Studios, we went to the new Toy Story Mania ride, got a FastPass, and then hopped right into the 30 minute line. The queue was a lot of fun which made the wait go pretty quickly. The ride itself was fantastic - you spin in your car and shoot at different fair-style games, hitting different objects for different point values. I would have ridden it all day, it was that much fun. But the lines were usually over an hour, so on the day we went, we did a few other activities, came back and used our FastPass for a second ride and that was it for the rest of our vacation. This will be top on my to do list the next time we go.
*Legoland was not all I had hoped for in my head. The Lego sculptures were pretty cool, but I had envisioned some great Lego-based merchandise and frankly, I find better things at my local Target than I did at the park. In fact, the Lego store in Downtown Disney had cooler/newer sets available and a great engraving service (get a personalized Lego brick!!) than the park did. Some of the things in the park looked run down/broken. My husband said the rides were not built for tall adults. Ask my son, and he will tell you the park was awesome. I was ready to get back to Disney World.
*Universal Studios was something I'm glad we did, but I don't feel drawn to return. We met the Grinch, saw the Grinchmas show (cute!) and rode some of the Seuss-based rides. Our primary goal was to check out the Harry Potter portion of the park, and we spent about 2 hours there. The themed pieces were well done - the merchandising, the setting. We didn't love the butterbeer, but we all tried it. We all rode the main castle ride. The warnings about people with motion sickness NOT riding it made me pretty anxious about the whole thing, even though I had already taken my Dramamine, but I really didn't feel sick from the bouncing around and climbs and drops. I did not care for the creepy parts of the ride and didn't feel the need to ride it again.
*I announced on this trip that there is nothing about being scared or sick that says "vacation" to me, so I happily skipped Test Track and Mission Space and several rounds of the Star Wars ride (I did go on that two or three times) and Tower of Terror, and I closed my eyes on anything I didn't like on the Harry ride. Call me a wimp, I don't care. That doesn't say "fun" to me. We all finally got to try Soarin' at Epcot and I loved it. My son was not a fan, so we only did it the one time, but I was content with that. It was great to finally experience it.
*I love that Disney has the PhotoPass system (although I have discovered several pictures that didn't get on our account) which allowed us to have lots of family pictures taken from our vacation without us having to bother other park guests. And we could get all of our pictures on a CD (for a price) whereas the other parks wanted you to buy each picture opportunity separately. (And our picture from the Harry ride was horrible. There was no way I was spending money for that kind of memory!)
*I also realized that the souvenirs are a big part of vacation for me - the t-shirts and the trinkets that will remind us of our adventure together once we are back into our usual routine.

Our vacation was a joy and I'm looking forward to getting our pictures back and getting them in books so we can look through them any time we want to re-live our trip!

Post-Vacation Recovery

Earlier this month, I went on vacation with my family. The "re-entry" process has been interesting. At home, there was a lot of recovery to do - bills to pay, souvenirs to sort out, Christmas decorations to pull out.

For work, I was back on track fairly quickly. I had kept up on my email while I was gone, and I had lesson plans in place so I knew what I was doing when I walked back into the building. The library itself was a little "off" - books not put back in the right spots or just left laying on top of other books, other things that weren't quite the way I would have them. I think it was just the idea that several other people had been running my space for awhile - there were little hints of it here and there for the first week I was back.

The hardest adjustment, though, has been emotional. The vacation was perfect - things went smoothly; the weather was ideal. On vacation, we did what we wanted. We ate what we wanted and we went where we wanted. If we wanted to chill at the hotel, we did. If we wanted to squeeze in a few more rides somewhere, we did. If we wanted to ride Space Ranger Spin five times in a row, we could. If I didn't want to ride something, I didn't. That meant while my family rode Mission Space - twice - I sat in the sun and soaked up the view of clear blue skies and palm trees. While my family went to Epcot one morning, I went to Animal Kingdom - alone - to take pictures and do whatever I wanted. I read two novels for grown ups - great, long ones that would have taken me a month to get through at home. I had really no complaints.

Coming home meant coming back to real life. Real life is messier than vacation. In real life, people wrestle with illness, death, hurt feelings, and betrayal - all things we came home to. Tragedy strikes half a country away and still feels like a kick in the gut. We're wading through projects that need attention and 1000+ emails that need to be skimmed if not deleted outright.

I have two things to keep me going - my pictures of our vacation together (ah, the palm trees), and the first hints of planning another vacation some time in the future.

Learned and Affirmed on Vacation

As you probably know already, our summer included a significant illness, a death, a funeral and a whole lot of time away from home for my son and I as we dealt with the business of death.
While I was thankful for the freedom of summer to deal with these things (I find it interesting that my father, a 35+ year high school teacher, died at the end of the school year), as the start of school approached, I hated that we had no vacation to show for our summer. So, we disappeared for a long weekend before school started.

Here are some things I learned - or had affirmed - on our trip:

• Some people are just rude - like the woman who took two phone calls during our planetarium program or the people who ate in the bustling and overcrowded hotel dining room but left their trash on the table for other guests to clean up. Here's a tip - if you carried the food to the table yourself, you also get to carry your own trash.
• I am not a museum person. I don't like to read every sign and absorb every bit of information. I like what I like and then I am ready to move on.
• My son is the same way.
• My husband, on the other hand, wants to look at every display and read every word.
• I like art that is straightforward - where pictures are what they are and the story/meaning is readily apparent.
• Some art, though, is even more straightforward than I'm looking for, which made me very happy that my son is still young enough to be fairly oblivious.
• If your vacation is in August, and most of your activities are outside, and you are in a mid- to southern area of the country, pack two outfits for every day. Yeash, we were a hot and sweaty group!
• I should not be trusted with a map. If I had been working the maps, we would have been lost too many times to count. Thankfully, my husband is brilliant with directions!