Impending Disney

It has been suggested that I go to Disney. And you know, I might sell some organs and do just that.

Our kid is 1.917 years old. He doesn’t know about Mickey Mouse yet, and wow, would it be great if he didn’t, um, ever, but he loves to do pretty much anything. Well, he loves to do almost anything so long as it doesn’t involve a fish—or worse, multiple fish—swimming directly towards him.

Actually, scratch that. While he formerly was terrified of aquariums, we went to the New York one yesterday and he was game even to have the walruses stream towards the plate glass window he was standing and touching, then do a backflip just as they reached the window, so that it’s entire zillion pound body was just on the other side of a piece of glass from his hand. You could look at the walrus straight in the eye. It made him laugh instead of scream.

And when looking at fish, he said WOOOOOOOO! with great enthusiasm, rather than trying to claw his way out of there by any means possible.

So, I amend my statement. My 1.917 year old loves to do pretty much anything, including visit aquariums. And he especially loves to do things that make kids happy, and he especially loves to do those things with his cousins.

He has two cousins on my side of the family: my sister’s kids. Amelia is a great friend to him. Just like a sibling, except for loving and kind. And he clearly looks up to Justin, who is 8.5 years older and who knows how to work the TV and everything. Like, not only can Justin push the buttons on the remote, he doesn’t turn it off, or turn the volume all the way up, or stop a DVD in its tracks, or make a menu appear that no one can make go away. Justin, who has also been known to dress up like Batman, is a total hero to Henry.

Their dad Rudy, who married my sister back in 1994, has been one of my favorite people for going on 17 years. He called the other day and said “I’ve been thinking that the six of us should go to Disney.”

He’s an accountant. plus he was the one who called with the idea. I tried to do some quick math in my head to keep up with him. Who would be included in the six? Oh. I see. That’s his little family and my little family. His little family used to go to Disney all  the time, on trips planned by my sister, but they haven’t been since spring of 2007.

I haven’t been to Disney World since I was six. Cool! I remember eating dinner with the Magic Kingdom lit up in the background. We also ate fried chicken with my father’s cousin who lived somewhere else in Florida. They had red ants and an empty swimming pool, and truth be told, that is what I remember more clearly.

Thank God I don’t have to go to Disney is what I used to think when my sister would tell me about the trip they were planning.

“It’ll be great,” Rudy said when he was introducing the idea of our trip. “You can take Amelia to the bathroom.”

He also shared his plans with us that we get up really, really early every day, and get out of the hotel as fast as possible, and let Henry konk out in the stroller rather than having actual naps, and also, we should actually make our dinner reservations now.

Like most vacations described and or planned by other people, this does not sound like fun. I’ve taken a personality test, and I know that I don’t even like to plan my own vacations. My idea of a vacation is that you don’t have to plan anything. Here is a vacation: waking at 9, drinking some delicious dark roast coffee with warmed milk an outdoor cafe while the land just over there is  lapped by salty waters and I write in a journal. Later, I take the sort of walk that doesn’t freeze me or gives me blisters. After a swim in a coldish ocean, I sink my brain into a novel in the late afternoon hours before dinner. Then an aperitif, and the chance to learn about delicious local specialties that I can eat in company of people from a different culture. Wine without sulfites, but not too much of it, is an important part of my vacation. I get to go to bed in a cozy bed at a reasonable time. It doesn’t involve Disney, and it doesn’t even my own child, let alone everyone else’s children.

I am an INFP. One definition of an INFP is that you like to be alone a lot. Another is that you can’t stand to plan vacations. How does an INFP who likes to go to bed late and start the day gently, rather than early and with sunscreen and lines and activities and speaking to other people, contend with all of this?

It’s time. I know. We’ll have an excellent time, I am actually certain of that. Plus my sister would want me to go. Well, she would both want me to go, because we will be taking a version of a vacation that she planned, and she loved that vacation. But I am also wholly aware that she would want to punch me for being able to go when she cannot. What she would want is she would want us to go. The seven of us. But we’ll have fun in her honor. I just have to reconsider my self-image a bit first.