Disney World is a great place to figure out if you are normal or not. I have often wondered, when my three-year-old daughter is having a decibel 11 meltdown with her arms and legs flailing on the concrete, all because her Sprite got knocked over, is this normal behavior? Do other people's kids act like this, or is there some mutation that crept into our family gene pool? On a recent trip to the land of mouse ears and princesses, I discovered that yes, other people's kids do act like this. My kids are in fact normal (if you can call flailing on the ground over a spilled beverage normal).

Disney World is a great place to watch people, and there are certainly plenty of them to watch. Nowhere else on Earth can one find more chocolate-covered kids whining about being tired, hot, or hungry. There is literally a meltdown around every corner. With these whiny kids come cranky parents. If I am ever feeling bad about losing my temper and yelling at my precious children, I need to remember just to hop on a plane and head to Magic Kingdom. There I will feel much better, as there is a park full of parents yelling at their children.

While all this whining and yelling is a bit on the annoying side, the strange person in me finds it a bit comforting. Whew! I said it. I am actually comforted by the fact that other people's kids whine and flail, and also by the fact that other parents, at some point, lose their temper and yell. We are only human after all, and there is only so much of that we can take.

Yes, we are normal.

We approached our Disney vacation with much excitement. After a should-be-six-but-turned-into-eight-hour drive, our kids popped out of the foul-smelling vehicle as we pulled up to Animal Kingdom Lodge. I felt really sorry for the valet, as he innocently entered what appeared from the outside to be a well-kept Tahoe. Once he climbed up into the driver's seat, I am sure it was only seconds before he deducted that someone must have thrown up in this vehicle, and he was now breathing the fumes. Chick-fil-A nuggets smell much better going down than coming up.

After we checked� in, our 3- and 5-year-old girls dashed to the elevator, as if they had never seen one of these machines before. Suddenly, it was as if we had just crawled out of some moldy woodwork, as our girls started pushing all the buttons in the elevator. We finally reached our floor, after getting to glance at each before ours, and the eager children bulldozed their way out the doors and started sprinting down the halls. This hall sprinting ritual ended up happening each of the 15 times we approached our room, and several times mom and dad even got in on the fun. Maybe we all came out of the woodwork, but I can confidently say that, for these two little girls,� racing down the halls ranked right up there with meeting the princesses on this Disney vacation.

Is this normal?� I can't answer that one.

A lot of planning went into this Disney trip. First, there's figuring out where to stay. Do we stay at a resort on the monorail, opt for the hotel with a waterpark out back, or wow ourselves with views of giraffes grazing outside our balcony? Then we had to decide which park pass to buy, what shows to see, where to eat dinner....

After all these decisions are made, we get to take a second mortgage out on our house to pay for it all.

All of the decisions and thousands of dollars are really okay, because you just can't wait to see the look on your daughter's face when she sees Cinderella's castle, or her expression after Splash Mountain drops her 60 feet into the simulated rapids. That is why I just didn't know what to say when my 3-year-old daughter, after arriving at the park and standing in a twenty minute line for the Goofy roller coaster, looked up at me and said, "Can't we just go