Disneyland with the Niece and Nephews

John, Michelle, and their little family showed up here this weekend for Disneyland. I'm back in school full time now, so I didn't get to spend as much time with them as I would have liked. Turns out that 16 credit hours really has a way of sucking up free time. Although I did get to go to dinner with them on Monday night, which was great. How many time a year do I actually get to spend Monday night with family?

Wednesday I met up with them at Disneyland. As soon as I got there Paige took my hand and we headed over to ride the Buzz Lightyear ride. We beat everyone else over there, and I told Paige that I didn't want to wait so we should just get in line. She was very hesitant, and seemed overly concerned for the safety of the rest of the group that had not yet arrived. Good thing she had her Aunt Julie to ignore her protests and shove her into line. While we were waiting in line she told me that they'd been spending a lot of time riding the same rides over and over again, instead of lots of different rides, because "that's what Johnny wants to do." After three consecutive rides on Buzz Lightyear with Johnny I began to see what she was talking about. Here's a picture from our last ride on Buzz: I don't know why that thing says I only scored 1,400 points. It's not accurate. I have no idea what Johnny is shooting at. Anyhow, we finally finished at Buzz and moved along to something different.

Because John and Michelle had taken Johnny and Paige on Splash Mountain earlier, which apparently didn't go well at all, Johnny was refusing to ride anything that involved water. It took quite a bit of coaxing to get him on Finding Nemo, and even then every 30 seconds, for the duration of the ride, he would tell me "I want to get off the boat." Although he did make it through without a meltdown. He refused to ride Pirates of the Carribean, so I volunteered to watch Johnny and Coen while the others rode Pirates. Michelle's mom was with us, and before she left us to join the others in line she gave Johnny a bag of popcorn to eat. It was kind of boring standing out there. Johnny kept saying something about pirate boats that I was never able to really decipher, and Coen was just contendly playing with his feet.


That's when Aunt Julie decided to throw a few pieces of Johnny's popcorn out in the lake for a duck that was swimming nearby. Johnny was instantly sold on the idea and the next thing I knew Johnny was telling me that the ducks must be hungry, and was throwing as much popcorn as he could fit in his little fists out there for the ducks...which did not look like they were exactly starving. It was kind of windy so popcorn was blowing all over the place, and I was sure some castmember was going to come along and shout at me for letting him make a mess, but I figured that until one showed up, he seemed to be enjoying himself. Coen had stopped playing with his feet, and was completely taken in watching his older brother. After a while I noticed that Johnny was running very low on popcorn. I told him that I thought the ducks were full and had enough to eat now, but one of the ducks flapped it's wings and starting quacking and Johnny told me, as he tossed another handful of popcorn out there "Look! He wants more! " I finally managed to convince him to stop throwing popcorn. When his grandma returned she took one look at the nearly empty bag, and asked Johnny if he was enjoying the popcorn. I had to hurry and explain the bit with the ducks, before she had time to suspect me of hogging down all of Johnny's popcorn.

Note the almost empty bag that had started out completely full.

I must say that watching Johnny with those ducks was really one of the most entertaining things I've seen in a long time. I just feel kind of bad that everybody else was off riding Pirates of the Caribbean and missed it.

After that John, Korby (a friend of Michelle's who was in town for work), and I decided to ride Splash Mountain. The three of us unexpectedly ended up in one log by ourselves, but we didn't realize that the workers weren't planning on putting more people in the back of our log, so we all climbed in and sat in the front three seats. As soon as our log shoved off John, who was in the very front turned around and saw what was going on. He tried to convince Korby to stand up and move to the back of the log so we could redistribute the weight a little better. Then he demanded that she stand up and move to the back of the log. She's apparently from the same mold as Paige, because she refused, on the grounds that she would get in trouble for standing up on the ride. I couldn't very well climb over her, so we were just stuck like that. John said that water was already washing over the front of the log, just bobbing along in the canal. Let's just say that I didn't know it was possible for someone to get that wet when there are only three people in a log. John was drenched, and he told me later that " it was all because Korby had to be a goody-two-shoes and wouldn't just stand up on the ride." It was hilarious.

After that I had to leave and drive back for my evening class. I'm sorry that they are all back in Utah, and based on the weather reports, they're probably sorry too.