The Power of Disney....

I've just come from spending a week at Disneyland and there is nothing quite like the Magical Kingdom to epitomize the power of fantasy. Of my two children, one did NOT want to go to Disneyland because he had NO idea what it meant and no description we could possibly come up with reassured him enough that it truly is the happiest place on earth, at least for five-year-olds. My other child was positively thrilled because, in her imagination, Disneyland was a place where the princesses wandered on rose petals and stopped to remind young girls that they, too, could be princesses. And even when this particular fantasy failed to be realized, Tinkerbell poised on her lily pad in the parade, the roller coasters, the rainbow of cotton candy all served to make up for the fact that the princesses were harder than expected to come by. And while the other adults around me enjoyed the experience, I don't know that they thrived on all the made-up tales like I did. While we started with the ones that Disney had already written--Snow White and her Dwarfs, Alice down in Wonderland, and the never-ending feud between Donald and Mickey, to which I must add that Donald still looks ticked off--these stories were just the tip of Disney's pink iceberg for us. The kids and I imagined where, exactly, Mickey and Minnie lived and whether or not they had gotten married and if they were settled into matrimony, my daughter wanted to know, how many children did they have? My son and I agreed that surely, in Disneyland, Buzz Lightyear and Mr. Incredible were good friends, neighbors, too. The whole place had to have been divided between good and the evil. Who got the pink castle? I asked. Definitely the good guys, both kids agreed. I thought so, too. The pink castle and the It's a Small World ride, too--that place was like a castle, too. Then, we theorized who was meaner, Ursula or Captain Hook, and who would win if they battled. Ursula, my daughter argued because she's so much bigger and Hook only has one hand. But my son countered with the idea that Captain Hook would just pop her like a balloon with his hook. The adults (uh, adults other than me, I mean) took to walking well ahead of us as we made up our stories, but we little folks ate it up. And I, in particular, confess to eating it up. All of it--day after day, even to the point of answering questions on the second leg of our trip home. While I often come from a week of vacation and feel like my "inner writer" is having seizures with the need to express herself, I actually feel wonderfully sedate after Disneyland. I think it had to do with all the storytelling we did....of course, it's also possible that it was all that cotton candy.

Danielle