Put on Your Mouse Ears

Photo Courtesy: Why Not Girl!

Imagine this: a 30-something-year-old couple getting up just as early as they would for work are standing in line singing the chorus of the theme to the Mickey Mouse Club as they wait to get on the monorail which takes them right to the front entrance of the Magic Kingdom in Orlando.  They skip through the gates and head straight to Space Mountain in order to get their FastPass and skip the impending wait of long lines later.  The two cover the park and hit all of Disney’s must-do attractions: the Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Caribbean, Splash Mountain and the Haunted Mansion.  They eat hot dogs for lunch and follow them up with about a pint of cookies ‘n cream (for him) and mint chocolate chip (for her) before heading back to the cold weather of Chicago.  Now this may not seem like such a strange scene if they were accompanied by a stroller with a toddler in it or the desperate pleas of an eight-year-old to go hug Pluto, but they weren’t.  These two are at Walt Disney World by themselves with no kids in order to just act like kids themselves.  And we enjoyed every minute of it!

This past weekend my fiance Chris and I did just that.  We threw our age to the wind and acted a little bit “goofy” at the Happiest Place on Earth.  We took a couple hours to just have fun and enjoy some of our favorite childhood memories.  Now I have to admit that it took a bit of convincing to get Chris to go, but if the laughing and slight screaming as we plunged into Splash Mountain’s Briar Patch proved, this trip was definitely a positive experience for both of us.

So many times we kind of get bogged down with work, responsibilities, wedding planning and just the overall expectation that since you are now at a certain age you have to behave in a certain way.  Instead of giving in, we may just need to get on that amusement park ride that excited us when we were eight or get a scoop of our favorite flavor of ice cream on a hot day and not care about the calories.  Just a couple of hours of fun can help us revitalize our creativity, want and stamina to take on new challenges in our professional and personal lives.  As Walt Disney said when he opened Disneyland in 1955, “Here age relives fond memories of the past…and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.”