Oh my gawd, I haven’t blogged for fun in forever. Hello, everyone! I missed you. I’ve mostly been writing blogs for corporate entities of late, in exchange for money. It’s a great system! But I had a joyful little moment the other day that’s prompted me to get back on the Hipster Mother wagon.
Earlier this week, we took Charlie on his very first Jungle Cruise ride. Andy and I first met while we worked on Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise, approximately one million years ago. (Yesterday was our 16th first-date-aversary. We both forgot until mid-day, and then celebrated with Mexican food.)
This is the best picture I got. It will do!
We’ve avoided Jungle Cruising with Charlie up to this point because he thought it looked too scary. What happens to that boat when it goes around the corner? Death? Probably death. He’s not interested in death right now. He has a lot of magic tricks to look at on YouTube, and he’s not about to throw that all away for a chance to take a boat ride straight to the pit of hell. We had the same fear issue with the caterpillar train in Disney California Adventure. Where does it go after it gets through the giant box of animal crackers? To the pit of hell? Probably to the pit of hell. But now that damned train is his favorite and literally the only thing he wants to ride. Over and over and over again. With Jungle Cruise, we once got as far as taking him through most of the line before he started screaming and panic-crying.
But Tuesday, he asked if we could go on it. He asked if it was still daytime, because it would be too scary at night. He asked right at dusk, so we had to move fast.
Charlie fucking loved it. He’s all about cheesy jokes right now, and our skipper was polished and totally on-script. When our skipper did the line about most people taking these rocks for granite, Charlie laughed like a goddamn lunatic. He has no idea what granite is, but he knew this guy was using a joke-telling voice, and Charlie loves to be in on the joke. His favorite part was “when that elephant joked at me that it was going to splash me.”
To see the love and family that we’ve built off of this puntastic theme park attraction was a special experience that made me feel feelings, like joy and hope, that have become harder to come by since right around November 8th of last year. I thanked our skipper, conveyed the momentousness of the occasion, and told him what a bummer it would have been if this evening’s ride had sucked.
Charlie at Trader Sam’s House
We also took Charlie to “Trader Sam’s House” at the Disneyland Hotel, which has become part of our pre-game ritual when we go to Disneyland. We sit outside, because the inside of this themed restaurant is obviously completely horrifying. They’ve got moody lighting, so that probably means that terror and death await. Charlie’s smart. He knows that blue gels on your overhead lights mean you’re evil.
Oh, he also asked to go on The Haunted Mansion for the first time, so we took him. It went poorly.
“It was supposed to be spooky fun, but it was just REAL spooky. I’ll never be happy again! Ahhhhhhhhhh!” – Charlie
Hipster Mother 