And now… recaps of our Disney trip, continued!  (These won’t last forever.  I promise.)

Now that we had conquered all four parks, we went back to our default — the Magic Kingdom.  I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again.  I could spend ALL of our Disney vacation at the Magic Kingdom and feel like the time was well spent.  I do enjoy the other parks, but there’s nothing like the original.  And because we know it like the backs of our hands, everything usually, generally runs smoothly.

That said, we began our morning with a setback.  Of course.  We plan on breakfast in the room each morning, bringing granola bars from home with us because 1) it’s cheaper, 2) it’s more convenient than dragging two sleepy children down to the food court, and 3) it’s cheaper.  (Did I mention that it’s cheaper?)  The girls ate that morning like normal, but as soon as we were through the gates at rope drop, Emma said, “I’m hungry!”  The granola bar wasn’t cutting it.  I was ready to tell her to just deal with it (because I’m such a loving Mommy) when Wes told her, “Let’s get a funnel cake and some chocolate milk” (because he’s a fun Papi).

He had more fans that morning than I did.

While the girls ate, he ran to get our first round of Fast Passes for the day.  Because we’d already ridden everything at the Magic Kingdom, we were planning on doing whatever the girls decided they wanted to do.  Which meant more than one ride on this…

It’s a carousel.  They have them everywhere.  All those Disney rides, and this is what they wanted to do.  Again and again and again.  Oh, well.  (Though I will say, it’s pretty magical doing this right beside the castle and all.)

We did so many rides in Fantasyland (the girls’ favorite land of all, obviously) and met characters as well.  I’m not sure when our girls will outgrow meeting characters, but we will likely not mourn the day when they do.  I think the longest line I waited in this year was forty-five minutes for Tinkerbell.  That’s a long wait for two minutes of two girls being awestruck while a cast member in wings tries to get them to talk to her.  Sigh.

They had no trouble at all talking to this character, though, likely because she started in with the obvious, “Oh, my!  There are TWO of you!”

After we met Merida, we met the guy with the worst job in all of Walt Disney World.

“See, what you’ll do is wear a kilt, make sure people aren’t hassling the pretty girl with the red wig, and let little children shoot a bow and arrow butt-level towards you.”  Kudos to you, Brave Man, for doing this every day, all day!  (And I know what you’re thinking.  “But, Jenn, your kids aren’t shooting that bow and arrow at his butt!”  That’s because I was standing there watching my children.  But we saw it happen with OTHER children.  Again, kudos to you, Brave Man!)

Speaking of characters and odd job assignments at Walt Disney World, I have to tell you that we’ve noticed something kind of bizarre.  It was brought to our attention all over again when we met Aladdin and Jasmine.

They look great, right?  Just… ambiguously ethnic.  We’ve noticed this before, when Disney has tried to pass off Hispanic girls as Mulan and blatantly white girls as Pocahontas.  We’re nerds so we know just enough to know that there’s a process behind being selected to be a face character at Disney, so we figured that the pool of applicants just isn’t diverse enough for the non-white characters to be cast consistently.  Until we showed up at World Showcase and noted that… hey!  Walt Disney World has TONS of young men who look just like Aladdin on the payroll in the Morocco Pavilion!  (And the China Pavilion?  A potential Mulan everywhere you turn!)  Maybe the pay as a greeter beats the face character pay.  But when my own very young children can see that something’s just not right with that Mulan (who is as white as me!), I wonder, you know?

I’m overthinking it, aren’t I?  Just wait for the day when a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Tiana tries to tell Emma that she’s the REAL Tiana.  It just might happen!

Anyway, at this point, we had reached the hottest part of the day.  Wes celebrated this with a Dole Whip and sent me on to do this with the girls…

This is where the creator of The Simpsons got the idea for the whole Treehouse of Horror episodes.  Because this treehouse, in that heat?  Is super scary.  (Every other parent out there was looking as bad as I was, hauling it up those stairs.)

After a trip on the Jungle Cruise, we headed back to the hotel to get ready for Round Two of date night.  Ana and Wes went on to the very chic and stylish Wave restaurant…

While Emma and I headed to Downtown Disney for dinner at the Rainforest Café.

We’ve never taken Em to a Rainforest Café, but we’ve always suspected she’d love it.  Sure enough, she spent the entire meal like this, watching all the action around her.

The waiter also spent the whole meal calling me “Mom” until I very nearly sent his teenage self to bed without dinner.  (I’m old.  I get it.  But I’m not NEARLY that old.)

When we got out of the restaurant, we discovered that the boats back to the hotel were docked because of a thunderstorm that was rolling in.  This called an end to our plans to meet back up at one of the parks with Wes and Ana, so we took a bus back to the hotel where we met up with the rest of the family and called it an early night.  I did sneak in a trip to the gift shop to try and find a jacket for myself (to replace the one Wes threw away), but I ended up deciding that I wanted this one instead…

Yep.  Wes’s jacket.  That’ll teach him to throw my puke-covered jacket away!

Up next… we see the world!