In my 42.5 year long life, I’ve been to Disneyland and Disneyworld a fair amount. But what I noticed about each of those trips is that I was less and less drawn to the “Disney” of the Disney parks, and more drawn to the thrill rides. If the ride didn’t cause your stomach to drop, then I considered a rest area. Rides like “It’s a small world” were rides you went on to humor your wife, or take a nap. And even with that, I found myself not looking at the displays during the ride, but looking at the ceiling, the floor, trying to figure out how everything was hooked up. I had begun the process of dismantling the “Wow” of Disneyland…
But something happens when you watch someone experience Disneyland for the first time. Someone who can suspend all the restrictions of what’s real and what’s not real, and just “believe”. It’s amazing.
My daughter is three months shy of turning 3, and we decided to take her to Disneyland because we figured she was old enough to recognize the characters…and she got into the park for free. And for weeks leading up to the trip we would watch Mickey Mouse clubhouse, watch Winnie the Pooh movies, etc, etc. We thought we were priming her Disneyland pump, getting her ready so she wouldn’t freak out when a giant mouse with eyes that don’t blink and fixed smile came up to her trying to hug her.
What surprised us a little was when we got to our room at the Disneyland Hotel, the headboard was this giant carved mural of the castle at Disneyland. When you turned on the lights of the headboard, it would play “A dream is a wish your heart makes”. We showed little H how to turn it on, and it amazed her. It wasn’t until we were out eating dinner that night, when Hannah turned to us and said she wanted to go back to Disneyland in our room…she thought that that was Disneyland! We had just assumed she knew how big Disneyland was…
What we didn’t account for was her ability to believe. To believe that Mickey Mouse is real “person”, that Handy Manny and Stitch weren’t just 2-dimensional cartoons, but characters that she could form emotional bonds with.
The watermark moment for us was when we took her on “It’s a small world”. We had just taken her on the carousel ride, and the dumbo the flying elephant ride, and to her it was fun. But “It’s a Small World” would be a full on blitz of her senses. Flashing lights, loud music, small people bobbing back and forth. But when we hit that first turn into the ride, and the music started, it was a magical thing to her. She had this smile that was just pure joy, the kind of smile that is completely involuntary. She was singing and telling us to look at different things. She believed.
Throughout our vacation, we wanted to make sure we took pictures with the different characters too, more as a visual diary for ourselves. But little H acted like they were friends she hadn’t seen in a long time. Even the characters that she didn’t know (like the giant bear with the unblinking eyes and wide open mouth) didn’t phase her. She wanted to say hi to them, hug them, take pictures with them. It was awesome.
Even though I didn’t get to ride all the big kid rides this time around, I think I will remember this visit to Disneyland above all the other visits. Because I think every visit that I made after my own first visit (when I was able to “believe”), was really an attempt to recapture that feeling of amazement and joy. And after each visit, I had concluded that you can never get that feeling back once you started dismantling the “wow” of Disneyland. But fortunately for us, our daugther helped us re-experience that “wow” feeling. For us, she helped us rediscover “wow”…
