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How to Enjoy Your Family's First Trip to Disneyland 1. Despite best-selling guidebook advice to the contrary, arrive at noon, starving. Make immediate beeline for the first café and spend $30 on hotdogs. Watch your 4-year-old, who is suddenly on an all-white diet, nibble his bun, spill apple juice all over you, and whine because he wants milk not juice. 2. Wait in line again for 25 minutes to buy milk, which your son will then not drink. 3. Realize you have left esteemed guidebook in the car where it will cost you more retrieving it from the hotel’s valet parking than it’s worth. 4. Begin with scary “dark” ride first, which you think guidebook said may be inappropriate for younger children. Keep saying, “This will be fun!” when your child insists that he doesn’t want to go on the ride. Avert your eyes when other parents look at you scoldingly. 5. When your child groans for the hundredth time that he is so hot and cannot walk anymore, remind him that he is at the Happiest Place on Earth. 6. Give in and buy your child a plastic sword, something you would never do at home, just so he won’t insist on being carried. Look the other way when he is in danger of impaling strangers. Hope the swashbuckling will keep him occupied so you won’t have to haul 35 pounds around the park. 7. Buy an Astro Blaster gun. Same reason as above. 8. Dress child in highest sneakers so he meets the height requirement for more rides. Say, “Really, he’s 40 inches!” when he is pulled out of line three times to be measured. 9. The next day wake your child two hours early as the hotel has a special early-entrance deal. Miss the first monorail into the theme park in your fruitless quest for palatable coffee. Arrive with the other attendees and irritable husband. 10. Go on more scary rides, with 4-year-old continuously asking, “Is this just pretend? Or is it real?” Assure him it’s pretend, though the water that soaks you is real. Try to remember the name of that child therapist your friend told you about. 11. Spend a full hour in line and $40 for three burritos, then watch as your child shreds the flour tortilla and takes three mini bites. 12. Give in and buy Mickey Mouse lollipops as they are the only non-white thing your child will put into his mouth. Worry about how few nutritious calories, or calories at all, he has consumed in two days. 13. Insist you will not run into Captain Hook, then try to shield child when larger-than-life Hook makes an appearance. Say, “That is not Hook, just someone dressed like him.” 14. Keep your child up hours past his bedtime to watch “Remember … Dreams Come True” fireworks that turn out to be cancelled due to high winds. Carry child all the way back to the hotel as he sleeps on your shoulder. Try to remember the name of that physical therapist your friend told you about. 15. Cringe the next morning when your son tells you he has dreamed of pirates with green, scary eyes who attack him with skulls and crossbones. Start the therapy fund. 16. Overhear other parents saying to their children, “Now, you’ve just got to learn to be patient,” as the line snakes around for miles. Feel superior because you have thought the same thing but refrained from saying it. 17. Whirl on teacups. Meet Tigger. Whirl on teacups some more. 18. Leave the park to go home. Pull over on the interstate because your husband is vomiting due to intense migraine and your son is crying because he misses Disneyland and his cat at home. 19. Promise to return again next year, because, after all, it really was the happiest place on earth. Christina Boufis is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in O, Glamour, Health, Salon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle and in other national publications. You can find her at www.christinaboufis.com.
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