Two / three weeks ago I spent 8 days in Walt Disney World with my family, my daughter's six person kick arse 3v3 soccer team (children have kick arse teams, adults have kick ass teams), and the mass of families connected to the team. I'm not going to count them all up, but off the top of my head that's around 28+ humans, with 10 of them coming in between the ages of ten and six. Toss in a pair of infants (one of which spent much of the time riding on my back) just to make sure the challenge is interesting. I think I could end this post here, and be deserving of at least the Congressional Medal of Fatherly Stupidity, but I'm going to continue.
Professional football coaches are paid millions of dollars a year to coordinate 22 people for a few hours a day, one day a week. There is one leader, and he is typically are true hard ass. These "men among men" typically wash out of the league within a few years. About .000001% of the population can handle that kind of pressure... for a few hours a day... one day a week. And we did it for 8 days, all day, every day. In fact, to be completely honest, I think Walt Disney days actually run about 35 hours each. The conniving little bastard was just that clever. But we did it, by God, we did it… (cue the music from Private Ryan). I’m just not sure we didn’t leave part of ourselves behind.
Children in Disney World go to bed hopefully by around 11pm, if you employ water boarding and veterinary strength sedatives. Tired soccer dads sometimes gather together afterwards for a late night drink and a futile, almost laughable hope of retaining our sanity. This causes us to go to bed even later. Infants in Disney World, or any place else really, get up at 7am. They also get up at 3am. Sometimes midnight, too, because they might have missed something. OK, maybe that's just my infant, but it counts for our purposes here. You'll notice that leaves about five hours for sleep, thoughtfully spread out over a larger period because you wouldn't want to use those precious hours of sleep up all at once. All that's OK, though, because when you’re in Disney stress is almost non existent... hehe... heheheh... HAHEHEHAHEHAHEH!!! Sorry... got away from myself for a second there. No, the reality is that withstanding the onslaught that is Disney is like drugging yourself with both uppers and downers, then picking a fight with a bunch of English soccer fans in the middle of gigantic, high speed, padded blender... while listening to three different songs at different volumes, one of which has the secret security code that will get you out of the blender embedded in its lyrics... in a foreign language. So it's doable, just a little wearying. You know, I think I could have just written that last sentence, called it a summary, and been done. Well, I've gone this far now. I would like to finish, but everything is starting to go gray around the edges again, and the high pitched, child like voices are getting louder. Perhaps now would be a good time to slip off and cash in another one of my 1.5hrs of sleep chips… It’s OK... I’m home now… I home…
No comments:
Post a Comment