The Enchanted Village: Torture for All

Before I begin, I want to briefly talk about the cuteness that is Anna. I had Anna "helping" me pick out clothes for the girls to wear on our holiday adventure Sunday afternoon. She was rifling through all the clothes hanging on the lower rack of the closet saying, "Look at all the pretty clothes." Then she grabbed a handful of dresses and said, "We wear these when people come over."

Rich and I had originally planned to take the girls to an outdoor place on Sunday after nap but the timing was sticky with dinner and the lack of dining venues at the outdoor place, unless you consider shivering while stuffing a hotdog and fried dough down your throat to be a wonderful meal. At the last minute, we decided to bring them to see The Enchanted Village re-creation at Jordan's Furniture. For those of you who don't live in New England, The Enchanted Village was originally displayed at Jordan Marsh, a department store, in downtown Boston for years and years and years. This furniture store now has part of the original restored display open to the public. For free.

The store (and display) closed at 6:00. We arrived at 5:00. Stupid me, but I didn't expect there to be a line. It isn't even Thanksgiving yet! Oh, but there was a line. It wasn't too long and it was moving so we joined in. This was all new to the girls so they just stood there soaking up everything and everyone around us. One of the employees told us that we were lucky as earlier in the day the line had stretched through the store, which is quite large, and around the building outside.

As usual, quite a few questions were asked regarding the girls. "Are they triplets?" "How old are they?" But we also heard many "They are beautiful" comments along with one "They are gooooooorgeous."

The store must have cut off the line at some point because I'm sure people would have continued to line up. There were approximately ten to fifteen groups of people in line behind us. This is when I started to get annoyed. The group behind us consisted of seven children and one adult. Two of the "children" appeared to be teens but seeing as they did nothing to assist with the childcare, they are lumped in with the children. In my opinion. Which is all that really matters as this is my blog post.

I had my camera slung over my shoulder and resting on my back so that I could easily bend over to talk to the girls or herd them through the line without whacking them in the head with the camera. Do you know how many times the little hooligans behind me bumped into the camera and/or my leg? Not once did I hear, "I'm sorry." Not once did the adult in charge tell the children to stop crowding the line. Nothing.

Now here's where I discuss one of my pet peeves (and yes, I have quite a few). I cannot stand when parents/caretakers allow children to do just whatever they want. It drives me insane. Have some control. I had to bite my tongue on more than one occasion with this woman. The last thing I wanted to do was start a fight in the line to The Enchanted Village.

Not only were they crowding me, which annoyed me to no end, but I was concerned that one of the girls would be knocked over. I had to sort of stand guard in the center of the aisle to thwart their attempts at standing side by side with us in the corral. It was absurd.

I started to take pictures of the girls waiting in line. This is all I was able to capture of individual pictures as I soon realized that there was a chance I could be plowed over.



The last stretch of the line was against a blue wall so I lined the girls up and pulled out the camera. I really should have been completly in front of them to avoid the angle of Em appearing to be larger than her sisters. Oh no, I was not allowed to do that. After I took the first picture, I heard one of the boys say, "Good, she took the picture, move up." I wanted to yell, "MOVE UP, WHERE? IN THE TWO FEET NEXT TO ME. BACK OFF."







(That is Em holding the pink piggy. She completely surprised me by asking to take it with her and Piggy has been sleeping in her crib ever since. She is still attached to Lion and Tiger and Puppy.)

Of course, it was a bit dark in The Enchanted Village and the girls were immediately petrified. There were tears. There were pleas to be held. Allie burst into tears at the sight of a monkey (a stuffed animal machine) playing the tambourine. We had mini hooligans stepping on our heels the entire time that we are trying to show the girls how much fun the displays were. At one point, the eight year old pushed the stroller right up to me and said, "Excuse me." That was his "polite" way of telling me that he wanted to stand in my spot. I looked at Rich and said, "Oh, no. He better back his ass up." Shortly after that, we allowed them to pass us and it was so much more enjoyable.

About halfway through, the girls finally warmed up and appeared to be having fun. Finally. After the displays, Rich went to the line to see how our family picture turned out (they took pictures before you entered the village.) I ruined it with a half blink, of course. While Rich was in line, the girls and I wandered over to see Santa. My heart skipped a beat when they expressed an interest in seeing Santa. And get this - there was NO line. I was attempting to walk them over when they all froze and freaked out. I even offered to go with them and sit on Santa's lap. They refused. There would have been tears so I didn't push it. Instead, I cried at having to walk away from a line-free Santa.

The girls cheerfully talked about our adventure all the way home. (Kind of random but they loved how we had to walk through the furniture store, including the displays of kids' rooms, to exit.) Allie wanted to know what we were going to do next and kept saying, "I was scared. I cried." I could say that about a lot of things myself, Allie.

After all was said and done, our adventure was a success.