Disneyland: The Timid Child and Rollercoasters

There's something ironic about taking an adventurous three year old and a timid eight year old to a theme park. The older one is tall enough to try every 'big' ride for the first time, but she's not sure she wants to. The smaller one is sad because she's not big enough yet.



My eight year old is the most timid child I've ever encountered. She's afraid of the dark, she's afraid of heights, and she's afraid of strangers. This doesn't bode well when it comes to taking her to places like Disneyland, where nearly all the rides are in the dark, the rides that aren't dark go up high in the air, and strangers abound... sometimes even dressed in creepy furry costumes, and those ones come up and touch you!

So I decided to take her on Space Mountain. My logic: if I held her hand in the dark, she wouldn't be so scared, and with it being pitch-black, you can't see how high up you're getting, therefore negating her fear of heights. All went well. We got on the ride, we traveled along up to the very tip top of the ride, right before you start flying, we got to the countdown without any real significant fear.... 10...9...8...7...6...5....4...3..2..1.................. And all the lights in the ride came on. And we stopped. And we didn't move again.. An announcement came over our speakers letting us know we should sit tight and not move while we waited for a Cast Member to come rescue us from the very tip top of Space Mountain. Which gave my Small Child plenty of time to gaze down below us, all the way to the bottom. Here eyes were as big as saucers. She was imagining climbing down the scaffolding, Spider-Man style. I pointed out the stairs, which did help a little.



Sitting there for twenty minutes gave me plenty of time to snap several awful pictures with my camera phone, thus running the battery down completely.

Ever wonder what Space Mountain looks like in the light? The most memorable part was the inch-thick layer of dust that covers literally everything. It was really kind of gross. Don't they ever clean the place?

And then we were escorted safely from our space coasters (by a fantastic Cast Member by the name of Anthony, who had a fabulous sense of humor) and trudged down something like twenty five flights of stairs before making it safely back to Earth. In case you were wondering, it's never a good idea to tell an eight year old who is afraid of heights that she needs to walk down twenty five flights of stairs. Happily, though, she did survive, and even went on to enjoy some other coasters. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was her favorite ride. Apparently open-air roller coasters are a better option. I'll have to remember that for next time.

On the up-side, we got a ticket good for our whole family to enter through the exit on any ride we chose. We skipped the longest and slowest moving ride at the park - the Nemo Submarines - and walked right on. Totally worth it. :-)

Disneyland: The Potty Installment

If you are touring Disneyland with a Very Small Person who has just recently toilet trained, there are some things you should expect:

Your child will have to go potty as soon as you're deep enough into a line that you can't easily get out of it, after you've been waiting for twenty minutes to go on the ride. Whatever you do, don't tell her to 'hold it'. The results won't be pleasant.

Every over-priced meal you eat will be interrupted as you trek across the park looking for the nearest bathroom, which is never anywhere near where you are eating.

Your small child will inevitably have more accidents on this trip than she's ever had in her short life all put together. Pack extra underwear. And then pack more.

The ladies' room will always have a long line when your child is the most desperate to go. And since everyone else in the line is also standing there with a little girl doing the potty dance, you can't use the "please, she's just potty trained and can't hold it long, can we please go in front of you?" trick that works at most other ladies' room lines. The best solution we found? Have Daddy take her in the men's restroom. There's never a line there.

Rule of thumb when driving fourteen hours each way: if one person needs a bathroom break, everyone gets out and has a bathroom break because if they don't, the one who didn't go when everyone else did will need to stop fifteen minutes later.

A guarantee: someone will request a bathroom just as you pass the last rest area for 200 miles. Or they'll need to potty when the only place to stop nearby is a dirty, run-down dingy convenience store that doesn't appear to have been cleaned any time in the past two years... and little girls have short legs: they can't hover.

Tip: if you have a toddler potty seat, take it with you. I'd rather dump and rinse the bowl of a potty seat than think about what wretched germs my daughter picked up using the nastiest bathroom in the state of California. The potty seat would also be useful when the need arises when you're halfway across the Mojave Desert and the only place to stop is the side of the freeway.

Another tip (that I failed to abide by, and regretted it): take along a stack of sticky notes. Every toilet at Disneyland flushes automatically, the kind of flushing that terrifies all children. Send your bigger kiddos into the stall armed with a sticky note to place over the electronic sensor, and they no longer need to be worried that they might be sucked into oblivion by the over-powerful Disney toilets.

Should I be ashamed that I just managed to write an entire blog post about pottying and Disneyland? Probably. But there you have it.