EPCOT birthday...

So Monday was my birthday and I really wanted to go to EPCOT Center. It's the least crazy park here, and it's a little slower paced than most of the things people want to do here so we usually don't end up going that often. It's always been my favorite park ever since I was little, so that's where I took Miss Elizabeth on my first birthday with her. I'm going to try and do this chronologically as best I can, we took a couple of professional pictures that Jen might be able to post later.

The first thing we did when we got there was take Miss Elizabeth to the baby station for some good food and a diaper change. Luckily for me, the changing station is right next to Test Track, so I rode that in the single riders line. The single rider line was awesome for me, literally walked right on to the ride in about 5 minutes. Probably not so awesome for the two strangers that had to sit with me in the 3 person car, but screw it, it was my birthday. No pictures of this, I looked mildly pleasant on the ride photo.

After that we took Miss Elizabeth on her first EPCOT ride, Journey into Imagination:

Isn't she cute? Ok, you're just going to have to take my word that she's in the picture and that's Figment in the background. Remember when I told you I bought my own camera? Yeah, I didn't know how to operate the flash. This was remedied later, but Elizabeth seemed to really enjoy Figment. She was in a pretty good mood to begin with, but she really did seem to be enjoying herself.

We then proceeded to The Land:

She was pretty pooped at this time, but this is one of her Mom's favorite rides so she gladly obliged by allowing her to enjoy the ride in silence.


YES, THOSE ARE LIVE ALLIGATORS IN THE BACKGROUND! This is one of my favorite parts of EPCOT. Sometimes the gators are more restless than others, but there's usually at least 20-30 baby alligators hanging out at any given time.

Then it was lunch time for the adults. I already had a soft pretzel and diet coke outside, so I played with Miss Elizabeth while Mom ate her Chinese food.

Miss Elizabeth's lunch looked strangely like my knuckles. She was really getting her money's worth out of this fake lunch, I think she was thinking that if she struggled enough that maybe, just maybe, some milk might come out. Alas, it was not to be.

I really liked these pictures though. For all the trouble of trying to take pictures on rides and fiddling with the flash and batteries running out, it's the simple little pictures at lunch that came out best. Ah well.

Off to The Living Seas (now known as the lame "Nemo and Friends.")


This was a nice picture until my expert photography skills came into play and had my thumb on the lens. This is why Jen is in charge of the professional pictures.

This was very fun for Elizabeth for two main reasons. She loves bubbles and primary colors, and these tanks were full of them. She woke up from a good nap just to watch the fish swim around. Plus, there was about 5,203,481 screaming children within 7 inches of us that weren't helping the nap either.

She fell back asleep on the actual ride though. Mom really doesn't like the flash on my cell phone camera though, usually doesn't work all that well.

I then tried to take a nice picture with my girl in the main EPCOT photo area, but we happened to be looking directly into the sun and I thought my eyeballs were going to spontaneously combust, so these didn't come out too well either. Miss Elizabeth isn't really a fan of the light, so both of us weren't having our best moments.

It was then onto the big ride for the day, Miss Elizabeth's first ride on Spaceship Earth. I love this ride, it's long and some people think it's boring, but I could ride this all day.

She hung out with me for about the first 3/4 of the ride, then it just got too dark and she needed her Mommy. But I was glad she hung out for that long.

It was also just my luck that as soon as I gave her to Jen, we went through the big lighted portion again so she got calm anyway. Ah well.

This next picture takes some explaining. They remodeled Spaceship Earth about 6 months ago, and now when the ride first starts up they take a headshot of each passenger and use the picture on a videoscreen at the end of the ride. It asks you a bunch of questions and shows you a little video of what you could be doing in the future. So when they were just about to take our pictures, I lifted Miss Elizabeth as high as I could and tried to position her where the camera would recognize her head instead of mine. And it somehow actually worked.

So that's supposed to be her head on a futuristic body that was running errands or something. My camera just literally died but at least I got something on my cell phone that showed her head on the cartoon. It was very cool and I was shocked it somehow recognized her head properly.

So that was my birthday at EPCOT. I then came home and did some work, but Miss Elizabeth gave me another present by sleeping through the night. Good times, good times.