Rick N Roxy!

We took the bus from our resort to Hollywood Studios for dinner at Mama Melrose’s.  We were sitting on the bus near a woman and her 4 children and they were having a conversation that we couldn’t help but overhear.

It was 6:00 p.m. and they were apparently running late for a show at Hollywood Studios that started at 6:45 p.m.  Mom was yelling at one of the children, blaming them for how late they were running.  “You just had to go into the pool one more time!” she berated him.  Rick & I exchanged glances and I remember thinking, just who is the parent here?

Then, she told the kids that in order to make it to the 6:45 p.m. show, they would be expected to keep up with her as she would be running as soon as they got off the bus.  Too bad for the 4-year-old, I guess, who probably couldn’t run as fast as the others.

This reminded me of something that happened on the Lazy River at Blizzard Beach that day.  Rick & I were floating along in a double tube and a little boy of 3 or 4 years old was temporarily separated from his mother on the river.  He was in one of those kiddie tubes with the center filled in.

He got a wild-eyed look as if he thought if he lost sight of his mother, he’d never see her again.  Rick pushed his tube around ours and toward his mother’s tube.  The wild-eyed look in his eyes dimmed a bit, but it was still there.

A little later, Rick started laughing and saying to me that the mother might have said to the kid “see you back at the car!” as she paddled away and out of sight.  Better yet, he said, perhaps she would say “See you back at the resort – hope you remember which resort, must less the room number”.

My husband, ladies & gentlemen.  Still, it got a laugh from me.  He’s really not a mean person…just dramatizing what might give the child reason to have such a wild look in his young eyes.

During the time that we were at DisneyWorld, we saw an awful lot of children struggling to keep up with their parents.  There were plenty of children in strollers but there were quite a few children running as fast as their short little legs would carry them, struggling to keep up.  Rick & I discussed the fact that when we were kids, we weren’t pushed around in strollers….we were expected to keep up, too.  I don’t recall my parents shouting at us, though, if we couldn’t keep up.  Nor do I recall being blamed if we were running late because they had let us go into the pool one more time before we left.

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