Fantastic Four

His fourth birthday dawned sunny and beautiful. (Not surprising, considering our zip code, but still.) Disneyland, ho!



He was thrilled in the car, still giddy at the ticket counter.



But then, the ticket clerk reached over and gave him a personalized birthday button. And worse! Said happy birthday.
He.
Did.
Not.
Like.
That.

He just hates attention when he's feeling overwhelmed, and Disney...? Overwhelming. It was a little too much, and his switch dialed itself on over to "sullen."



Good times.
He didn't want to go on the submarine ride. No flying Dumbo, either. ("Mom, I don't like flying things.") I convinced him to try a Buzz Lightyear alien shooting game, which brought about temporary happiness, but back outside, he positively withered when he took in the crowds.





At 10:02 a.m. while we were eating this snack, he suggested we go home.



I didn't give up, though, and eventually coaxed him to the Jungle Cruise, where I caught him smiling. (He especially liked the elephants, and it was fun to watch him try to decipher whether they were real or not.)



Then we climbed up some tree house thing that was way too high for me (hello, heights phobia) but it made him happy, so up we went.





Honestly, in most cases he liked waiting in line more than the actual ride. Here he is enjoying the line divider outside of Winnie the Pooh's Great Adventure or Wild Ride or Madcap Experience or some such thing.



I really wanted to avoid It's a Small World, but he decided the exterior was a "robot castle" so we decided to hit it.



I call this masterpiece "Crabby Little Boy by Blue Whale."



We did some other small rides in Fantasyland, did the Haunted Mansion (he was unimpressed) rode Buzz Lightyear again, then had lunch in Toon Town.



He was still really squirrelly, pestering me to leave. Actually, it wasn't so much that he wanted to leave as it was that he wanted the toy I'd promised at the end of the day. His aunt Erin had given him a little birthday cash, and I told him that before we left he could pick out a souvenir. So once he fixated on that, it was over.
But I was not leaving until we'd done Pirates of the Carribean. I couldn't get him excited about it--mostly, I think, because he couldn't picture it. Boats and pirates and wha?
Whatever the reason, he didn't want to ride it, no matter how hard I tried to sell it, and I couldn't exactly drag an unwilling kid through the line.

So I tried a different tact. I took him back to the Buzz Lightyear ride (holy god, the number of times we criss-crossed that f-ing park), where I remembered seeing a toy shop. One $8.50 blue light-up Lightyear blaster later, we were back in business. For some reason, that toy gave him the confidence to attack the park at full throttle, so we ran through the crowds, me playing a fleeing bad guy, him close on my tail. When I suggested we go "blast some pirates," he was all about it, and practically sprinted to the line.





We rode it three times in a row. I had to make him promise not to blast his blaster on the boats, and he obliged, keeping it quietly on his lap, his small finger ready at the trigger.



Happy Birthday, kiddo.