The Kid ditched us! - A third party trip report about DS and his Grandma!

[Bluegrrl]

Hi! This is a live third party trip report (Like it says!) about my DS4 and my mom on their first solo trip to the world! It's a quick one weekend, but I will be adding details as I get them, and is sure to be filled with some funny moments.

Some brief details about the people and reasons for trip:

Reason:
My mom inherited a house here in Punta Gorda that she has been trying to sell. She live in Chicago, and since she is coming down here anyway, she decided to swing by and take boy to Disney for a night. They both have APs, so it's not like they are wasting tickets for two days or anything. Just a little swing-by visit. It's also a test to see whether boy can handle being away from mom and dad deal too.

Hotel: Shades of Green. It's our favorite place!

People:

Mom (aka Gaga, and Mom for connivence sake here):
She has a PH.D in nursing/midwifery, a former Captain in the military, has been to Uzbekistan to open a midwife clinic, Honduras as a Doctors without boarders style healthcare mission, Rwanda to help set up women's healthcare centers and still has managed to loose my boy at Epcot once. Amazing woman, but I was a little worried.

Boy:
My son, 4yrs old. Incredibly friendly, and intelligent and very funny boy (or so I say!) Natural redhead, with cute blue eyes, and little toddler girls are all over him at his daycare! He has a really odd sense of humor, our favorite joke of his:
How do you stop a fan with a banana? You put a banana in it! Yup, that's our boy!

And now the real mom (me!) and dad:

I love Disney, but my DH is not crazy about it, coming from FL and all. I'm more nervous about leaving boy, but my DH is OK, and feels like everything will be cool. I guess that's it, because you won't be hearing much about us anyway. After all, this is 3rd party trip report!

Finally, I'm sure how everyone does this fancy posting stuff, but I'm going to try and get this up quickly, and will be adding details as they go along. I'm going to break the posts up, so no one will get caught in a block of text. Sound OK? OK. Here we go….

So….

Pre-trip:


We (Me and DH) had been talking about sending boy to be with Mom this summer. Since he's starting school soon, with thought it might be good and selfishly, I thought it might be nice to have a week to ourselves for once! Ah, think of it, we could go the movies, sleep in, go to eat at fancy places…the dream! And when I was little, I would stay for a month with my grandparents, so this was normal. Well, since my mom was working, we couldn't figure out a good time.

She called one night and told us she was coming to FL from Chicago to finalize the Punta Gorda house sale, and since she was heading down, would we like to go to Disney for a stay over. DH and I were OK about not going. She then asked if she could take boy. Why not? So prep started.

She was going to arrive on the 16th of July (yesterday) late at night. Then take off on the 17th (today!) very early in the morning to make rope drop at MGM, with the hope of getting there in time to sign up for Jedi training, then do Frozen sing-a-long, Star tours, and finally Star Wars fireworks party.

We HAD to have him packed up on that Saturday, since the trip was so short, and they needed to be there right away. Thankfully, we live in Altamonte, and getting to Disney is really quick. But a 4yr old is a bit of a rockstar to pack for, and we are in the tough stages of potty training, which means tons of under ware and tons of pants to pack + pull-ups for night. We have been lazy about potty training, I admit. But mom is a hard-core person when it comes to that. I am secretly hoping he comes back potty trained!

I packed boy up with all his luggage (not too much), hauled the stroller out and cleaned it up nice (boy asked to use it, and it really is the last year of it), and got it all ready. Now for some grandma!

 

[Bluegrrl]

July 16 - The Gaga has landed!

So, mom was supposed to arrive very late tonight, which meant I went crazy with laundry.

I hate doing laundry, so we had a backload of it, plus our house was pretty messy. Whenever I put his toys away, boy just follows along, pulling them back out! Thankfully, my wonderful DH took boy out for lunch, followed by trips to Toys r Us, and target to keep him out of my hair while I cleaned. I rolled out the stroller, vacuumed the breadcrumbs out of it, took out the baby toys and tied some green ribbon on it. There usually isn't any trouble recognizing the stroller, but since I changed it up a bit, I figured ribbon would help.

Now, you think all this adventuring with boy would tire him out so he could go to bed and be refreshed for early Disney trip on Sunday, right? Nope. Boy is an Energizer Bunny! He just goes! No naps, no sleeping, no nothing. My mom arrived at around 10pm that night, and boy was up as could be! He wanted to sleep with his Gaga, so, she laid down with him.

Usually, one of us will lay down with the boy until he is asleep and then leave, but I think mom was pretty tired. I thought she would come out and join DH and I, but when I snuck in boy's room to wake her up I got a brush-off!

Fun note about my mom. She DOES NOT like being woken up, and has always been pretty violent about it. She's super sweet, but something about being woken up triggers something in her. She threw a hairbrush at my uncle when she was in high school, has yelled at me a couple of times, hit my dad - it's like prodding a sleeping bear. Enter with care. So when she sleepily said "leave me alone", I left her the hell alone! DH and I both thought she needed the sleep anyway.

DH and I knew we needed to load up the car seat for boy, so we got the key for her rental, and loaded everything that we could up into the car. We put the keys back into her purse, left a note saying that the keys were in her purse (she loses stuff), fixed our alarm for her, and went to bed.

 

[Bluegrrl]

July 17 - And they are off!

Around 7am our alarm goes off. I groggily get out of bed with a "do I have to?" type feeling to make sure the two of them are ready to go. Are my darling boy and mom out of bed, charged with energy to face a wonderful day?

Nope. Both of them are in bed, fast asleep. I gingerly approach my mom, like Chris Pratt and the Raptors in Jurassic Park. She woke up, and of course, asked me why didn't I wake her up earlier? I told her that I tried, but she didn't want to wake up! Parents.

She got ready, while I got my little zombie man ready to go. He's very funny when he wakes up, he has a funny zombie look, and just stumbles around.
Anyway, I dipped him in sunscreen (redhead), and my DH and I got everyone loaded to go. We gave my mom a to-go cup of coffee, boy a snack cup of cheerios and cup of juice and they were off.

DH and I went back to bed!



Boy and Gaga's adventures begin and our adult adventures continue:

(Pictures will be put in soon.)

From the texts I have gotten today, this is what has happened -

I know that boy and Mom got to Disney Studios first. They didn't check into Shades, because they wanted to go directly to jedi training, which they did. Apparently, DS wasn't very busy, so they got a 1pm show.

DH and I slept. Slept and slept. It was great. Every so often we got texts:

Boy was doing great, according to mom and the texts I got. After signing up, they went directly to the Frozen sing-a-long. Now, I really hate Frozen. I despise the movie. But boy likes it, and he likes Olaf, so, I try to deal with it. But according to my mom, boy loved the singing, and by the end of the show, he had sung so much, that nearly all the CMs knew who he was! He's very friendly - not in the annoying way, but in the actually adorable way. He even got to meet Olaf, who signed boy's Olaf hat! It was all pretty cute, and boy apparently kept a good attitude despite the early wake up call.

……………………………………..

DH and I woke up and decided that we were very hungry. We had made reservations for dinner at a local place called Colorado Fondue, which we love. If you are in town - try it out. But dinner was at 6 and I was hungry! We were also on a LEGO hunt. We stopped at a Jason's Deli for a snack (ended up being too much food, but hey, you know?) and then went to TRU and Target. You know, adult stuff, right? We didn't find the LEGOs we wanted though.

……………………………………...

I hope they ate between Frozen and Jedi training. If they did, it would be at Backlot Express, where they serve his favorite food - Darth Vader Chicken and Waffles. I'm guessing that they did that.

After they (I hope!) ate, they might have ridden Star Tours. If so, he LOVES that ride. The bouncing and such cracks him up.

I am assuming that they then went to Jedi Training. The first time he did Jedi training was his birthday, and he was pretty funny. He was so very excited about fighting Darth Vader, that the CMs had a hard time keeping him from charging Vader on his own. When they asked who wanted to fight Vader first, boy raised his hand and yelled out, "ME!"

Mom asked boy what he wanted to do next, and he told her, "Go to hotel." So it was out of the park for the both of them. On their way out though, they caught sight of Daisy and Donald with barely a line. Naturally, he had to run and give them both hugs. Mom said it was very cute. I got sent a picture, and it was, indeed, adorable.

………………………………………….

We were still killing time, so we decided to see if we could find the NXT performance center in Orlando. For those of you who aren't wrestling fans, WWE has a development roster down in Orlando called NXT, plus a performance center/gym/rehab center for WWE wrestlers. The center is actually better than most if not all NFL, NHL, NBA gyms! We figured, why not look for it? But then we figured it was a little stalky for us, and there was a better use of our time. Baer furniture store was open, and we looked at dining tables for our room. Exciting, eh?

Dinner at Colorado Fondue was great! Thanks to my great brother and SIL, we still had gift certificates, and that covered the whole meal! I had the filet, and DH got a steak and shrimp. We then had a chocolate turtle fondue. So good!
……………………………………………...

On the way to Shades, boy fell asleep. Too much fun? They checked in, and fell asleep. During our dinner, I was worried that they would the miss the party, so I texted them.
Turns out they were out swimming! Boy is a natural fish, and mom reported that it was hard to drag him out of the pool. But drag she did, and got him ready for the fireworks party. She sent us a picture of him sitting on a bench holding his Man-Bat, a Batman villain. The boy loves his superhero figures. According to my mom, boy loved watching the "Fireworks and Laser show", and really likes the Chewbacca cup they gave him at the fireworks

……………………………………………..

We rolled home with bellies full of fondue goodness. At home, we just kinda chilled. Nothing big, DH played his Dragon Age game, and I conked out. The cats curled up with us, and I decided to write the trip report.

Fun fact: around midnight-ish both DH and I heard a rumble that didn't sound like thunder, but then did sound like thunder. What the heck was it? We've lived in Florida long enough to suspect it was something like a……SONIC BOOM! Yes, yes, it was a sonic boom from the SpaceX rocket. Even as far away as Altamonte, we do get sonic booms from the rockets every now and then.

……………………………………………

So, that's it for now. Who knows what tomorrow will hold? I'm sure that there will be some funny things, and I will get some photos going.

Thanks for reading so far, and I promise to update. Have fun.