A Planner Goes to Disneyland....
Our school district gives a four day weekend for President's Day, while many other Southern California school districts do not. This made it a good time to deliver on the trip to Disneyland I'd promised my kids: We expected that the crowds would be lighter than usual school holidays, at least on Friday.
I don't go to Disneyland often enough to know if we indeed had lighter crowds than we would have had some other time, but we had a great time either way. Given my personality, we of course had a plan for how to spend our time. It wasn't a rigid plan, just a rough idea of the order in which we'd do things to maximize our enjoyment and minimize our time spent standing in lines. I think it helped to have that plan, particularly the part listing which restaurants and food carts would have food my rather picky 10 year old would actually eat.
But not everything can be planned ahead of time. Somehow, I had not learned that there would be no fireworks during our visit (due to construction on Main Street). We could, however, see a very brief burst of fireworks from our hotel room on our first night. They were part of the special Lunar New Year portion of the World of Color show at California Adventure. I'd planned to skip that show: it starts late, and it is long for kids. But once she saw the fireworks and the lights we could see from our window, my 8 year old was adamant we should see the show. This made for a longer Friday than I'd anticipated, and threw us off our plan. I'm blaming the eventual meltdown about dinner on this fact! Maybe that is unfair, but I still think having a plan for a big outing like this maximizes my enjoyment of it - because let's be honest, dealing with an 8 year old who is whining that she wants Wetzel's Pretzels for dinner is not a lot of fun. (She got the pretzel. I insisted on adding a smoothie, and decided to call it a meal.)
If I do a "five whys" analysis on that meltdown, I can trace it back to insufficient contingency planning. (Why did she meltdown? Low blood sugar. Why did she have low blood sugar? We pushed dinner too late. Why did we push dinner too late? We had extra time to spend waiting for the show, and wanted to minimize the number of times we waited in line to get into a park. Why didn't we have a good dinner plan inside Disneyland? Insufficient contingency planning: I'd assumed we'd go to the Mexican restaurant my kids like in Downtown Disney.)
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