Oh Oobi-doo, I Wanna Be Like You-oo-oo

Can you guess what I did yesterday?

Can you?

That’s right baby – Disney on Ice! Are you jealous? You totally should be, it was awesome.

Got tickets for M for Christmas. She’d never really been to an auditorium show before – a short one at the aquarium on her class trip in October, but this was her first “big show”. She spent most of the first half hiding behind the set in front of her, peering over the top, then shrieking when a character came on that she recognised (“Baloo! Mom! Look! IT’S BALOO!”), then going back to hiding behind the seat. Eventually she settled down and sat on one of our laps and stared with glazed fascination.

It was good fun, we all really enjoyed it. Since we don’t have any English language kids channels, M mainly watches DVDs, and she’d got a pretty substantial proportion of the Disney canon. She ‘knows’ that these were just people in costumes, but I think in that way that you can when you are 3, she really bought into those characters as being ‘real’.  She really liked the Jungle Book bit, that’s been a longtime favourite film. There was a Pirates of the Caribbean number (based on the ride, not the film, which is based on, erm, the ride…) that she liked. Also one based on the Haunted Mansion, which I quite enjoyed and thought was nicely done, and M mostly watched through her fingers from behind the chair.

Lately she has been getting into watching The Incredibles too; we have had it for a while but she never wanted to watch it until recently. Part of the ‘story’ – such as it is – of the show involved the Incredibles having to save Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse, who have been put under a spell by Malificent. (You may remember her from Sleeping Beauty – the wicked queen with the spinning wheel? Yeah, that’s her.)

So it was a good time, fun show, everything all good, happy happy, brilliant family day out. Oh, until was time to leave, and M wanted us to buy some overpriced plastic piece of crap pirate sword, and we didn’t, and she had a massive meltdown that lasted all the way out of the arena and down two city blocks until we could get into a cab. In the cab she passed out, slept for a good 20 minutes, then woke up getting out of the cab and carried on having her enormous strop-to-end-all-strops for about another hour. *sigh* Three year olds, they really don’t know much about gratitude, I tell you.