We only had tickets for the Disney parks from Monday through Wednesday. Tristen was originally planning to go back to work on Friday, but I thought it would be silly to have to drive back Wednesday night or Thursday and go to work for one day then have the weekend off.
Laura treated us to a breakfast at Perkins. The kids were a bit of a handful for that. Very scattered, didn’t really care to eat too much.
Tristen and I were planning to go to Disney Springs at some point, but since we were out and the kids were a bit wired, we all went ahead on over there. Disney Springs, formerly Downtown Disney, is an area with a bunch of shops and restaurants. It’s free to get in, but it was harder to get in there than it was to get in any of the parks. Just like in the parks they had temperature checks and bag checks, but they didn’t seem as organized about it. I also got a little extra check, though I’m not sure it it was a random check or something was suspicious about me.
We went to Disney Springs when we were in Orlando with Milly a few years ago. We saw Rogue One there. (Yes, Tristen, it was Rogue One.) There’s a LEGO store with some amazing LEGO sculptures outside of it and a large Disney store, which is where we spent most of our time. Tristen went in first as I was taking some pictures, then I took the twins in. Laura, who was pushing Griffin’s stroller, apparently went in at some point but we never saw each other.
It struck me how infrequently our boys have been shopping. The only stores I can think of them having been in over the last two years are Home Depot once and Costco several times. While Costco does have some toys and the boys all mess with them some from the shopping cart, they’ve never been in a store so filled with toys and dolls and other such merchandise. They were very into playing with things, particularly a large Emperor Zurg (from Toy Story). I didn’t even bother to look at the price on it, but I was guessing it was around $60.
Anyway, we looked around a good bit and Tristen bought a few things then we headed back to the Vistana and put the kids down for a nap. I took a bit of a nap myself and woke up when Tristen was trying tog et the boys into swimsuits to take them to the pool. Fawkes was giving her a good bit of trouble and said he wanted to go night-night, so she put him back down. I told her to go ahead and take the other kids and I’d join her when Fawkes got up. He definitely fell asleep again for a bit, but when he did wake up he still didn’t want to go to the pool. I finally got him moving by telling him we were going to go look for everybody else.
The pool we went to was right across the street from our building. It was one that starts out super shallow and sloes in gently. It also had several fountains in the very shallow area where the kids could go splashing through them. Griffin and Phoenix were having fun and it took no time at all for Fawkes to start having a blast too. Tristen hadn’t put on a bathing suit, so she obviously wasn’t swimming around, but Laura and I played in the pool with the boys for a while.
Tristen put the boys in the bath when we got back, I suppose to warm them up as much as anything else since they had just been in the pool. I was convinced to get in there with them.
We ordered food from Uno’s for dinner and put the boys down a little early. Laura hung out in the room while Tristen and I went back to Disney Springs. We wanted to get some shakes from the Ghirardelli Chocolate store and Tristen wanted to look at Christmas ornaments. She got a few things and on the way out we saw an art store. On the off chance that someone who might have a surprise gift ruined for them, I won’t say what was purchased there.
We ordered our Ghirardelli shakes after that. The way it was set up was that you go through a socially-distanced line to place the order then wait outside, where they would bring out your order and shout your name. After waiting about half an hour I asked someone about it and he found it. I asked him about it and he said they’d called our name a few times, which baffled me because we were not far from the door. The shakes were good, though a little melted.
We packed up and loaded about as much as we could when we got back so it didn’t take much for us to be ready to go the next morning.
We left around 9 the next morning I think. Laura drove most of the way. The ride back wasn’t quite as smooth as the one down was. Griffin in particular got very fussy at one point, but at least nobody projectile vomited. We made a couple stops for gas and one stop at a rest stop to change Griffin’s poopy diaper. We let the kids walk around a little it to give their bums a rest from sitting literally all day, but Griffin pooped again in that time.
We got home around 5:30 or 6. Tristen worked on getting dinner for the kiddos while I unloaded things. Erin was still at the house and ended up just staying over. We got on an SNL Celebrity Jeopardy kick and she went to bed after I subjected her to a few Epic Rap Battles of History. Tristen went to bed before that. Once I was all alone I watched the latest episode of WandaVision, which was awesome.
SPOILE ALERT. Stop reading if you haven’t seen episode five of WandaVision yet.
The episode itself was good, with the twins aging themselves from babies to five-year-olds to ten-year-olds, Wanda confronting SWORD, and Vision piecing together that Wanda was controlling everything, but the kicker was the appearance of Wanda’s brother, Pietro (Quicksilver). It wasn’t, however, the MCU version of Quicksilver, who died in Avengers: Age of Ultron; rather it was the Evan Peters version of Quicksilver from the X-Men movies.
The significance of this, dead readers from the future, is that Disney bought the rights to the X-Men a couple years ago in their purchase of Fox. Putting so many entertainment properties under the Disney banner is a bit of a scary thing, but was overlookable for the opportunity to unite all the popular Marvel properties. The purchase allowed Disney’s MCU to bring the X-Men (as well as the Fantastic Four), which was always my favorite subset of the Marvel Universe, into the MCU. But how to bring the mutants into an established world was a bit of a conundrum. As one thing I read said, the final scene of the episode literally has an Avenger opening the door for the X-Men. Very exciting stuff, if you’re into that sort of thing at all.