This morning the weather was looking pretty ugly and both girls were showing signs of wear from lack of sleep, so we punted on going into the park, opting for breakfast and the drive home. Tara slept in the car on the way, while Anna watched a video and Jen and I listened to our favorite podcast. Though things started out well on Saturday and early Sunday, it became clear that as far as Anna is concerned, the whole Disney empire amounts to the necessary evils of the princess lifestyle. She’d much rather cut to the chase. This is similar to my own view, only I have less appreciation for the princess lifestyle. Rather than try to put together something cohesive–I’m far too tired–I’ll merely sum up in a thumb-oriented manner:

• Thumbs up for the Princesses. They were all lovely and charming and Anna absolutely ate them up.

• Thumbs down for all else Disney.

• Thumbs up for the Hyatt Regency Orange County. The room was quite nice and not unreasonably priced.

• Thumbs down for the California Grill at the Hyatt. Breakfast was way more expensive considering the quality of the food.

• Thumbs up for Outback Steakhouse’s curbside take-away.

• Thumbs down for the parking attendant who took my two-day self-parking ticket, and after deciding the scanner couldn’t read it, tossed it into a garbage can with hundreds of other parking tickets. I made him sort through the whole can to fish it back out.

• Thumbs up for Allyn’s helpful tips which were much aid to the planning process.

• Thumbs down for the massive crowds at Disneyland.

• Thumbs up for my kickass cell phone and ShoZu, which allowed me to easily upload photos to Flickr.

I will relate one story about the video on the right: as we were waiting in line to visit Ariel in her grotto, Anna asked why she had legs when we saw her on Saturday, but a day later, she had a fish tail. I had just been thinking the day before about how Ariel didn’t speak at the restaurant, and since I hadn’t seen the movie since shortly after it came out, it took me a while to make the connection on the whole legs-for-voice trade with the sea witch¹. Anyway, I explained the situation as I new it, and Anna immediately gasped and turned white. “That means the sea witch is alive! Mom said all the witches were dead!” Oh boy. I tried to stammer out some other possible explanations, but ultimately told her to ask Ariel. Thankfully, Ariel didn’t miss a beat and explain that her father uses his magic trident to change her back and forth, apparently it helps with the commute from California Adventure.

• Thumbs up for being home, the true happiest place on earth.

¹ Note to Disney: this is taking things too far; unless the girl playing Ariel has laryngitis, she should abandon technical accuracy and talk to the princess-seekers. This is not a Star Trek convention.