Now featuring a Yeti

When Ethan and I were in the bath Saturday evening (something I try to avoid, now that he's learning about "pwivate pawts") he had this to say about Disney World: "It was a tiny bit scawy and a liddle bit loud."

Only when you have a two-year-old in tow do the many frightening bits of the world reappear as they haven't since childhood. The wicked witches are truly terrible; the loud booms of fireworks distract from their magnificence. Luckily, however, Ethan adored all the characters he got to meet: Handy Manny, the Little Einsteins, Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Goofy and Donald.

Almost-three is a great age to take a kid to the Magic Kingdom (especially in off-peak season). Nobody told this to the family at the table next to ours at Chef Mickey's, who had brought their daughter there for her first birthday. Her present? Repeated terror, each time a well-meaning character approached the table. When poor Minnie came bouncing through waving a napkin in the air like she just didn't care during one of the hourly un-birthday celebrations, the child let out a blood-curdling scream that sent Minnie dashing for the door.

There were a number of highlights—including Ethan and I dancing at Raglan Road pub with a professional Irish dancer...

riding Dumbo with Ethan for the fourth time as he shouted "Go up high!", laughing as Ethan asked to ride more "coasters" after enjoying Goofy's Barnstormer, to name just a few—but one of the greatest was that he was able to go there with all four grandparents, one great-grandparent, and two of his three uncles.

I must say, a January trip to Disney World has merits beyond nearly non-existent lines at the parks (we ran, literally, through the Haunted Mansion, Expedition Everest (which we had to ride twice, because the first time I was too busy screaming and cowering to see the giant Yeti overhead at the end) and Big Thunder Mountain lines, just because we could), and one of those is it sure helps you to get over the post-Christmas blues. (Noah loves Christmas so much that he starts getting sad about it being over sometime in mid-November, even though I forbid...forbidded?...forbode?....forbade him to act melancholy this year.)

We enjoyed a couple days of Christmas decor—including the Mickey head outside Magic Kingdom rendered in poinsettias—and witnessed for ourselves the extent of Disney magic when overnight the elaborate and fantastic holiday displays disappeared. We also really enjoyed some of the parks' upgrades, including the new Finding Nemo section at Epcot and the excellently re-imagined Spaceship Earth, which includes an interactive touchscreen as you journey through space and time to learn about the history of human communication. It would have been even better if Ethan hadn't chosen Korean as our language of choice on the touchscreen, for the entire ride a chipper and presumably informative Asian woman narrated through the speakers behind our heads.

I won't even mention that I was disappointed it was too cold to swim considering the rest of the country was blanketed in snow. What a time to escape to Florida, eh?