Memories to Last a Lifetime - Grandparents.com

Four nights. Three days. Not long. But long enough for a vacation to remember.

We followed the children. We were children. We woke up at dawn. We leaped up. We smiled. We put on clothes, but hardly looked at them. We put on shoes made for walking, not posing. We ate pancakes and strawberries and joked and laughed at the table. No newspapers. No TV. No talk of war or work or problems or goals or chores. No "have tos." No BlackBerrys. No briefcases. No sitting in traffic. No radio. No complaints. No outside world.

"Do you want a banana, Lucy? Do you want more water, Adam?"

Let the children lead. And we did.

"Instead of going somewhere romantic for our wedding anniversary, what I'd really like to do is take all the kids to Disney World," I told my husband a few months ago as we sat at the kitchen table, talking cruises.

And, God bless him, he didn't even sigh. "If that's what you want," he said.

We called our children, picked a date, booked flights, marked our calendars, and kept our fingers crossed.

Our kids and their kids. Three generations. Our first extended-family vacation.

But the kids are too young, people told us: Lucy, 4, Adam, 3, Charlotte and Megan, just 9 and 6 months. They won't remember a thing.

But we will remember, we said.

Two weeks before the trip, everyone was sick. One of us got the flu, another pneumonia, two kids came down with ear infections, and then one by one, half of us were felled by some 24-hour thing.

Right up until the day before we were to leave, someone was witch-green. But then it was over. Magically, amazingly, the big day dawned and everyone was beige and standing.

The staff is nice at Disney. Being nice is part of their job. But they don't make it feel like a job. They make you feel special. And isn't that what everyone wants?

A parade surprised us our first hour at the Magic Kingdom. We turned and there were Jessie and Woody from Toy Story marching with a bunch of other characters down the street. Jessie paused in front of Lucy and knelt and reached out to her, and Lucy looked at this cowgirl she knew only from TV and hesitated. But then she took her hand. And we watched as Lucy stepped into a world that until this moment had been only a picture.

Then Woody paused, too, and opened his arms and she walked between them and they hugged.

Will she remember this? Maybe not.

Will we forget? Not ever.

A clerk in a store overheard Adam's mom tell him that he could get a Pooh Bear or a Mr. Potato Head but not both. And she said, "Would you like to make a Potato Head right here?" And Adam nodded yes and chose parts from a dozen bins, and when he was finished the clerk announced over a loudspeaker that Adam had made the Potato Head of the Day. And then she climbed on a ladder and placed it on a high shelf with all the other Potato Heads of the Day.

Life was like this for three days — nice people and smiles and ice cream and parades and music and giraffes and Nemo and Cinderella and the Lion King and Mary Poppins, one ride, one show, one prince and princess, one magic moment after another.

Okay, so there was a fly in the ointment. The 24-hour thing returned and my husband and I missed the character breakfast at Tony's Town Square Restaurant. But Tony still sang "Bella Notte" to all the other married couples, and Adam and Lucy danced and had their pictures taken with Donald Duck.

And we recovered in time to fly home.

"We're going home?" Adam cried when my daughter started to pack. "We're going to my home? To my yellow house?"

"Yes," she said. "In the morning." He must have thought we had moved — and why not? We'd packed his clothes, flown on a plane, and taken along all the people he saw every day of his life.

"But I don't want to go back to my yellow house," he said. "I want to live here at Disney World."

I understand my grandson's wish to stay in this place. Who wouldn't want to live with music and magic and dancing bears all the days of a life?

But you can't live at Disney World. It's like childhood. You can only visit. You can only stay for a little while.

Four nights. Three days. It wasn't a long while. But long enough to create memories that the adults and, who knows, maybe even the kids, won’t ever forget.