The Great Adventure: Day 6: Georgia to Disney World...

We woke up early, determined to squeeze the last bit of fun out of our Florida resident Disney passes before we left the state.  You see, when we moved here, the Disneyland obsession of my childhood meant that common sense did not stand much of a chance when constant fliers arrived telling us that we could purchase season passes for $16 a month.  And when a season pass was less roughly the same as 3 days in the parks... I was sold.

However, this has meant that I'll look for pretty much any excuse to use said passes and so that we "get our monies worth."  And this was our last chance.

We loaded up the car and headed south through Georgia, with Sadie chatting about Disney World the entire way.  When we arrived it became clear that Mae remembered this place, because she actually started trembling and clapping her little hands together as we neared the park (Mae Bae is a big fan of the monorail and the tram from the cars, which may even beat her favorite in-the-park ride, It's a Small World).

It quickly became clear that my idealized spring and winter picture of our visit, was going to be very different from an August visit, as I waddled around, gigantic, feeling as if I were going to have the baby at any moment.

Which brings me to a question for all women who have experienced this (everyone who is freaked out by pregnancy symptoms may want to skip on to the next paragraph.  You've been warned.).  One thing I've been struggling with these past days is extreme pain in my pelvic bone.  It seriously feels like my pelvis is splitting in two, while holding a bowling ball.  The pain is in the front.  I don't remember feeling this way at all with the other pregnancy, and have wondered if it's just the fact that my muscles aren't quite as supportive as they were with the first two pregnancies, after so much stretching and unstretching... but wow.  It's really, really feels like I'm in the late stages of labor all the time.  Anyway's back to your regularly scheduled post:

After an hour and a half wait for Splash Mountain (with Mae and me strolling around the park since we both can't go on it) at Sadie's insistence (it was the one ride she wanted to go on... she's our little thrill seeker, and I'd thought I would be fine...), Paul finally found Mae and me outside of a bench at the entrance to Adventureland, where I promptly dissolved into tears that sounded like this:

"Where were you?!?!?" (now remember, I told her about ten times we'd be fine and that he could take Sadie, since she was sooooooo excited...)  "It took you forever to find us.  I said outside of Adventureland.  And we've been here for an hour and a half."  (in response to the question, why didn't you go inside a store or a restaurant where it wasn't 100 degrees and humid) "And every time we went inside anywhere Mae would melt down and scream at the top of her lungs.  And scream.  And scream.  With a cookie on her hand.  A chocolate cookie that she spent an hour eating and smearing onto her dress, while fussing that it was dirty.  While I was afraid I was going to pass out from the heat and you weren't here and... and... and..."

You see, despite the giant bottle of water I had downed while sitting very still in the very hot outside that Mae refused to leave, I'd been having contractions and feeling faint for quite a while, and having contractions does not bring out the best in me.  I always picture contraction time as a time for prayer and "offering it up" but in reality, I have yet to handle such a situation gracefully.  Or even vaguely gracefully.

So I waddled along with the family, tears streaming, to the park exit and up to the monorail where we stood and waited for the train to arrive.  And then it did and our doors... didn't open.  And despite the fact that we were in the front of our line and I was crying and holding my stomach, clearly in a lot of pain, apparently there was no other room anywhere else on the train (we had been at the front of the line for our section) and the train whisked everyone else on, while we were instructed to wait in front of another door opening, and everyone who worked there pretended they couldn't see me (it must have been really, really difficult to miss the gigantic tearful pregnant woman clutching her bump in agony). While I imagined a nice, cushy wheel chair so I could just sit down for a few minutes...  

After another five minutes of standing in the heat, trying not to have the baby right there on the landing, another train appeared and I collapsed onto the seat of the virtually empty car (apparently there weren't a lot of people who wanted to be around in case baby was born right there on said-mono-rail) and made it to the tram, and managed to not die before we got to the car, where the air conditioning, for once, blessedly worked.

Sitting down made the contractions stop.  Arriving at our hotel was a treat, since I'd made reservations the night before on hotwire, had paid less than we'd paid for a motel six, and had arrived to find a lovely room in a very nice hotel waiting for us...

And I was determined to take it a bit easier on the last day of our trip...