Mommy, Daddy, Baca, Mimi, Mickey's Castle!!!--Pre Trip Report - UPDATED 4/11 About This Page:

[KimandMark]

Oh, my its been a long time...I'm not sure if I even did trip reports for our last three trips. After the epic 40th birthday/getting pregnant/missing nationals/no wine at the wine festival trip I've barely been a presence here.

Blame the kid.

Short Version: Mommy, Daddy, Weeman, and my parents (Baca and Mimi) are returning for our third family trip in three years. These trips have been alternately awesome and exasperating.

The first trip was great, weeman was just over a year, and didn't give us any grief, took naps, went to bed at 7:30, slept til 6:30, my parents (being old) stayed in every night and Mommy and Daddy had several dates. God Bless DVC and their two bedroom suites.

The second trip was...well...annoying. Turns out weeman needs a tremendous amount of preparation for the crowded, stimulating environments that are Disney. We didn't know that yet, he was just turning 2. He wept and wept every day and there was nothing we could do to stop it. Truly awful and a flashback to his colic days.

Then my mother happened. My mother is not very healthy, although a huge part of that is serious hypochondriac factor. Anyway, based on her insistence that she was not all well enough to leave on our trip in 14 days, you know, since she'd had her gall bladder out 3 months earlier, I had to fart around with DVC points and basically make a mess of our trip. I also rented her a scooter. Kiss of death right there. Suddenly there was a menace on our hands, who now felt she could do anything, go anywhere and basically disappeared with my father for the entire trip. I get it, they have friends in the area they don't see often, etc. etc. BUT. I pay for this trip. I buy the tickets, both plane and park, I get the room, buy the groceries, rent the car and the ever loving scooter. All I ask in return is babysitting at night. Not every night, but some nights. I was probably sensitive due to the hoop jumping I did two weeks prior, the insanely unhappy little man, and now I'm missing dinner at Jiko.

Let me be the first to say I'm an ungrateful brat of a daughter. My parents live 7 miles from me, they watch my son one day a week, and are pretty much always available for date nights/short get aways/FFW sans children. HOWEVER, my mother has no respect for the efforts we have gone to for them to live near us (our doing, their desire), bring them on vacation, and provide a variety of other services for them. Her regular requests usually begin with "Since you were going to do X anyway can you do...." with X ranging from going to the store (no biggie) to build an addition on our house (not even kidding). I live with love and frustration all at once.

Ugh, and I forgot this...Mom wanted a whole family trip for their 50th. We booked a Disney cruise for three nights for them, us, my bro's family, and a close cousin and spouse. Grand Villa at AKL. TWO YEARS of DVC points for us involving banking and borrowing. Immense levels of planning. She decided to bail. Because, you know, we plan trips all the time, what was the big deal. ARGH!! That's why we are going in April rather than the fall. But I digress (and vent. and rage. and put on my happy face and smile through my teeth.)

But, on to this trip. This will be weeman's first trip with an active knowledge of what Disney is (he remembers the fireworks!!) and will be seconds shy of 3. This is also the first trip with FP+ and trying to plan and coordinate the limited FPs. This is our first trip in which we intend to let the weemand stay up twice--I know! We're living on the edge!! First trip doing the Jiko Wine Tasting. First trip in which I've created date afternoon and made it clear that for our one big Mommy/Daddy event we are going to be gone from 3PM until late.

Next post--the saga of Florida resident passes, broken ticket links, FP+ selection, and the F'in Scooter Revival and Sob Sisters Tent Meeting. (EDITED TO ADD--Okay, so that wasn't my next post...I posted about kids and sleep and blow up bed and bathrooms, I'm not as organized as I used to be, but I promise the Scooter Revival and Sob Sisters Tent Meeting will be a thing!!)

(My mother is a wonderful woman who love me, loves my son, love my husband and would do anything I asked. Sometimes she makes me bananas.)

[bsblady01]

great start

[crythomas]

Can't wait to hear more

[lfredsbo]

Great start!

[Colexis Mom]

Welcome back Kim! Great start! I hope all goes well with the trip!

[KimandMark]

I thought I'd throw in update since the big 40th Trip/Baby Report 3.5 years ago. Adam is going to be 3!! Oh, lord. How did that happen? We had 6 months of colic and horrifying bad sleep. So bad enough that people (like the nurses at my OB/GYN office, for example) said SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH YOUR BABY.

We have a ped that is amazing and basically said we have a hard kid. It is what it is and its a good thing his parents are old, smart people who can handle it. Handle it was hardly what was happening. At one point I had a very serious and sleep deprived conversation with Jake about giving him to my best friend who was struggling with fertility. It was bad.

At 6 months we took a horrifying trip to MI for a race (yes, I still race, no I'm not even a shadow of my former self, 10lbs heavier and a whole lot slower, but in local events, I can still beat some a$$) in which Adam slept not at all. I read Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Baby on the way home and the next day when nap time came I followed the routine I'd followed for 6 months: songs, milk, rocking. But this time when I laid him in his crib and he got angry (always angry, never a sad cry, an angry yelling without tears) I didn't return to the rocking chair. Instead, I calmly said that it was time to nap and that he needed to sleep and left the room.

The worst 25 minutes of my life were next. He yelled. Yelled and yelled. For 5 minutes. Then he just sort of laid there, playing with his fingers and babbling suprisingly pleasantly to himself. Then he turned his head to the side and slept. He slept the longest nap he'd ever taken. EVER.

And God smiled and sanity returned and the sun came out and Mommy became human again.

And since then, thats the pattern. His room is very dark and he has a sound machine and a twilight turtle too. We got him a big soft Pooh Bear in October at FWF (an parents trip...) and he sleeps with that tucked under his arm every night. But the 25-60 minutes of self-soothing chatter has never changed.

So, for this trip, I'm in a bind about sleeping. In the past he slept in the pack n play (I highly recommend getting a playyard mattress--search Amazon. so much better for sleep!) in the bathroom when we traveled. Yes, the bathroom. I know, I'm a horrible person.

I was planning on renting a full size crib this time, because he doesn't fit in the pack n play, and setting it up in the master bath of the AKL two bedroom. But then last month he finally climbed out of the crib so we took the side off the crib and put a railing up. And then we realized we'd need a different solution for vacation--he's not going back to the crib. He's a big boy. Unless you're talking about the potty, in which case he'll tell you he's still a baby. Sigh.

I ordered the Intex inflatable toddler bed and hoped we could make this work. He'd been pretty good about staying in bed and waiting for me to come get him. Seriously, he has this enormous fire truck that makes an ungodly racket and he wants it in his bedroom. So I told him fire truck sleeps at night, on the floor. And amazingly, my kid somehow buys this and lets fire truck get his rest, then as soon as I come in in the morning, he runs to it, like he's been waiting all night! Anyway, I ordered the bed for vacation. I put in the hallway by his room, still in its box. He saw it and wanted to know what "that guy" was doing. "That guy" is how he refers to other boys and he was looking at the picture on the box. (I have no idea where 'that guy' came from...I call them all 'little boys'). So we set it up and he's been sleeping on it all month.

So here's the my thinking/problem/question. Should I still put him in the master bath? He likes the blow up bed, doesn't get out at night. He follows the stay in bed edict to the letter if not the spirit of the rule--by this I mean he keeps his feet in the bed but tries to reach books or other lovies that might be outside of the bed by stretching out as far as he can. We had a talk, he's stopped doing it for the last few nights, but we'll see. Okay, so essentially, he doesn't leave the bed. He still needs 30-60 minutes of alone time to fall asleep. And dark. Very dark.

The master bath in a DVC two bedroom is really big, like half a hotel room big. The toilet is behind a heavy door that can be shut and he can't open, based on the doors he can and can't open at our house. There are no climbing opportunities that present hazards (he can get in and out of the tub I suppose).

My inclination is to put him in there and watch like a hawk on the video monitor until I know he can handle it. I just can't see him sleeping well if we share a bedroom and the living room would mean no one could go in there either. But I feel like a bad parent. I'm primarily concerned about his sleep, that he gets enough.

Thoughts?? Remember when I was worried about how much wine was too much? Yeah, well I still worry about that, but I also worry about nearly 3 year old not sleeping.

Oh, he's getting a real bed next week, we're waiting for delivery of an acutal mattress!!

[KimandMark]

Originally Posted by Colexis Mom

Welcome back Kim! Great start! I hope all goes well with the trip!

I was realizing as I typed my previous post that your baby and mine are nearly the same age!! I'm sure it goes even faster with other kids, but it feels like it flew by!

[shazza]

Looking forward to more.

[Cam22]

back, Kim! Great start! Sounds like the blow up bed is going to be a success for the trip.

[MayraLR]

Signing in.

[OhToodles!]

Welcome Back! Sounds like you've had quite the past few trips! And I know about splurging on points - 2 bedroom club level at AKL, but we at least got to go on the trip.
I have no advice for you on where to put him to sleep, but if he's used to the bathroom I don't see why it would hurt to put him in there again.

[KimandMark]

So, the Scooter Revival and Sob Sisters Tent Meeting...AKA do we or don't we?

As you read in my first post, we got Mom a scooter last year. She had her gall bladder out three months prior to the trip but just wasn't feeling great yet. I decided to get one for her, mostly so that she could actually spend time seeing her grandson and not need to rest/go back the room/find a spot to sit. All things, by the way, that have been going on for YEARS of trips with my parents. When the lived in Florida a decade ago my visits were always puncuated by Mom resting/stopping/sitting/ or just generally feeling like she couldn't do anything. The scooter solved that and she loved it. More than you could imagine. I loved that she was with us, but I despise what that scooter means is happening to her.

This frustrates me, because much of this is her own doing through lack of self-care and a big part is she's a hypochondriac. Not diagnosed or anything, but if she's got a cold then she's got pneumonia, if she's got a sore knee she must have torn her ACL (as if). Family members have worked together and apart for years to help her get her diet and fitness somewhere close to healthy and it falls on deaf ears.

This was a woman who told her father to go F himself in 1958 because she was going to college and not getting married. This is a woman who moved with two small children to a backwoods town in NY and decided to live in a house on a dirt road half a mile from pavement. She plowed that dirt road every day all winter, in a suburban. I grew up watching her waterski, jump off docks, drink homemade wine, and cut down trees. She was tough and no-nonsense and awesome.

And now she won't even drive to the store.

So, I hate the scooter. I hate it because it enables her. She doesn't need it, she needs to walk a little, around her neighborhood. With Adam. My father won't leave her for a minute, so he drives her everywhere but never does for himself--stopped going to the gym, or the coffee shop, or swimming. He takes Adam out for walks in the woods and to the store but that's it.

So, do you see? Do you see why this ever loving scooter is something I don't want to get?!!

TL;DR---Of course I got the scooter. You knew I would.

For those interested--Walker Mobility rents the Elite Go-Go Travel Scooter for a reasonable price. You can dismantle if fast and it fits in the truck of the mini van with a Bob Revolution Stroller. So, there's that.

[Colexis Mom]

Sorry that although the scooter has helped, it has also hurt in many ways!

[Cam22]

Definitely a love/hate for the scooter!

[crythomas]

Sorry that scooter has brought you much unhappiness.