“What would I give to live where you are
What would I pay to stay here beside you
What would I do to see you, smiling at me
Where would we walk
Where would we run
If we could stay all day in the sun
Just you and me
And I could be..
Part of your world.”

– “Part of Your World” — The Little Mermaid

Home.  What a wonderful feeling!  Although it may seem as though I’ve been here all the time, I am writing my first post in a whole week.  Through the magic of automatic scheduling, all the pieces that have appeared here since August 11 were posted before I left town.  It’s great to get away, and even better to be home again, with a whole new collection of memories.

This was a special trip for me.  My favorite-oldest-granddaughter, Ivy, is fifteen.  Of all the members of all the generations of our family, she has been the only one who never made the trip to Walt Disney World.  When we discovered last January that this was weighing on her mind, we decided to put aside other ways to spend our cash and save for a sort of  ”childhood bucket list” trip to Florida.  It’s not always easy to be a teenager, especially when you live with your grandparents and need to deal with the old folks’ point of view about things.  Our kids face pressures that we can’t even imagine.  As one who grew up in the era of black-and-white values and the hygiene films that illustrated them, I can’t fathom being fifteen and facing the sort of adult pressures of drugs and alcohol and R-rated behavior that has become the norm.  Our children are bombarded daily by images and ideas that require them to leave the shelter of childhood and grow up way too fast.  What began as the fulfillment of a wish to complete her childhood became something much greater for our Ivy.  Rather than wrapping it up and leaving childhood behind, we spent five days watching her rediscover the part of her that still has a few years to grow up.

“Take a picture of her face when she sees It’s A Small World for the first time,” my elderly dad instructed me.  He has such fond memories of watching Ivy’s mother light up when we vacationed with them one summer.  And he was right.  It might not have been at that exact moment, but something miraculous happened during our day in The Magic Kingdom.  All the worries of being fifteen, all the pressures of teenage life, all the stresses of school and peer groups and worries about growing up melted away as we accessed a part of ourselves that still holds the treasure of childhood innocence.  We danced down Main Street U.S.A. to tunes from The Music Man.  We watched as the Beast became a prince due to the love of Belle.  We rode with Buzz Lightyear, “to infinity and beyond.”  Most importantly, though, we found ourselves in a place where there is no division between generations.  All of us were young, and all of us opened our hearts to the fairy-tale world where good triumphs over evil every single time.  For five wonderful, magical days, the generational barriers dropped and I found myself enjoying being a part of her world — the world of family and love and making memories to last a lifetime.

‘Watch and you’ll see…someday I’ll be…Part of Your World!”