The Vacation of Their Lives: Kenna Edition

Last fall, to celebrate my Michael finishing his Master's program, we took a rare family vacation to Orlando. It has been six months, but I still cannot emotionally handle that the trip has not been chronicled. I hope to spare you a day-by-day play-by-play but still preserve the memories of that magical trip.

Kenna, we learned, has her feet firmly planted in the "chicken" camp when it comes to amusement park rides. Yes, she is young. But she is also ridiculously chicken. She didn't like any ride that had any significant motion or any hint of something that might give the mere suggestion of an adrenaline rush. Little movement. No scariness. She was terrified of the troll ride in Norway at Epcot, but loved the viking souvenirs in the shop at the end.


She wouldn't even consider getting on the "easy" side of the Mission Space simulator ride because of the warning speech they gave. To my knowledge, she was neither pregnant nor epileptic but she made quite a scene about not getting on that ride. Imagine our surprise when, later in the week, she insisted that we ride Star Tours (also a simulator) no less than 5 times and proclaimed it her favorite ride of the whole trip. I think her love of the ride is because the first time we rode it, her picture was flashed on the screen as the rebel our space ship was trying to safely deliver to another part of the galaxy.


In a superbly shameful act of parenting, I "boosted" Mackenna's height by 1/2 inch (by demanding that she wear a certain pair of shoes and by strategically placing a french braid on top of her head) to get her (force her) on The Forbidden Journey ride at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. She screamed in terror the whole time. Why it was so important to me that we all ride this ride together I don't know--especially considering that only 4 people can go in the thingy together at the same time anyway! Don't worry too much, the bad mommy bought her a turkey leg for lunch (one of her favorite things in life) and a lollipop the size of her head for dessert.




Mackenna chose to spend her souvenir money on a baby panda stuffed animal she named Snowball, a light saber key chain (because she loved that stinkin' ride so much) and a Voldemort wand (?).


Kenna only had 2 To Do's for this vacation and one of them was to meet Jasmine. I was so happy that we were able to meet that goal! Jasmine was so kind to my girls and even taught them how to stand like she does for pictures.


My Michael and I couldn't believe how great Mackenna was with all the walking that we did. Generally, she is a lazy bit of goods. She complains that her "belly hurts" if we walk to the end of our street. We've had calls from the teacher at school about Kenna's mysterious ailments that only occur at P.E. time. We didn't know how it was going to be with her walking for so long each day, but let me tell you: she was a champ!

Here she is as a pretty panda munching a piece of bamboo:

Mackenna really hates it when we talk about anything that happened before she was born. Generally speaking, it hurts her feelings that our family did anything worthy of recollection before she came along. For that and other reasons, I am so glad that we didn't take this trip without her!