#21: Stef shares what it’s like to take an infant to the park for the first time. A first for her son and a first for her husband and her. She shares the infant-friendly rides, navigates virtual queues, and responds to the needs of her family.

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Ariel Landrum 0:03
Hello, everyone, welcome to The Happiest Pod on Earth. I’m Ariel.

Stefanie Bautista 0:07
And I’m Stef, and we are Disney fans. But we are really so much more than that.

Ariel Landrum 0:10
Like I’m a licensed therapist who uses clients passions and fandoms to help them grow and heal from trauma and mental unwellness.

Stefanie Bautista 0:16
And I’m an educator who uses passions and fandoms to help my students grow and learn about themselves and the world around them. Here at Happiest Pod, it’s a place where we dissect Disney mediums with a critical lens.

Ariel Landrum 0:27
Why? Because just like we are more than just fans, we expect more from the mediums we consume. So Stef what Disney media experience are we dissecting and sharing today?

Stefanie Bautista 0:36
It is definitely an experience. And it’s one that we’ve heard before and many of you might have been going through. But we are going to be talking about my first trip back to Disneyland with a baby. It’s been a while. First time with a baby of my own. I was thinking about this, and there have been many times that I’ve gone with my nieces, my nephews, other kids, friends of you know, friends of mine to have kids, but going yourself with the baby, your own baby is kind of a whole different ballgame.

Ariel Landrum 1:09
Did going with those other babies give you at least some idea of how to prep or what you needed to to like consider or because they had other caregivers, maybe you only focused on like small certain parts?

Stefanie Bautista 1:21
Oh, absolutely. I think I always kind of watched like, how many bags did they take? Are they overpacking? Did they have enough food for them? Are their kids picky? I always take those things in consideration just because for me, it’s like going on a field trip with other kids. So whenever I’m on a field trip with my students, I have to make sure that you know I have their emergency stuff like I have kids medicines, I do a head count, which I always did when we traveled with a big group of kids at Disneyland. We always made sure like “1-2-3-4-5. Okay, we have everybody, we’re good.” Thankfully, I was just responsible for my one child who is mobile, but still can be in a stroller. When I go with my nieces and nephews, many of them are walking now they are you know elementary school age. So for them, it’s more of you know, what rides are they scared of? What rides do they like? What experiences and characters do they identify with, as opposed to bringing a baby, which is really what is safe? And what won’t upset them throughout the day, because you want to have a good day to.

Ariel Landrum 2:28
You’re talking about, you know, a baby that’s non nonverbal. So, it really and because this is, you know, your son’s very first time very, very first time, everything is a is a reaction. None of his like recall memory or response to like, “Oh, this is something I’ve seen before and it’s familiar and comforting.” It is brand new, like sensory information for him.

Stefanie Bautista 2:51
Mm hmm. And even during the pandemic, I know we mentioned in another episode that we had visited Downtown Disney before when he was much, much younger, maybe a couple months old. And we were able to do a Taste of Disney, which was the food event at California Adventure. So many of these sites might be the same, but because his eye development wasn’t there yet. So he might not even have remembered that he was watching Cars Land or he might not even remember that there was a big ferris wheel that was in front of him.

Ariel Landrum 3:22
Because the visual perception is up close, right? And even color recognition.

Stefanie Bautista 3:27
Yeah. And on top of that, there’s no real like character interaction. So there wasn’t anybody getting into face, or I wasn’t bringing him into anything that was in front of him that he might have recognized. So really, it was a new experience for him overall, aside from the fact that he was maybe used to the noise. I think that was the only thing that was familiar to him.

Ariel Landrum 3:48
And this is slightly different experience. I think that you’ve had but probably similar because you’re a military wife, one of the experiences that I have had with other military wives who’ve had infants and you know, their partners returning is that theirs “stranger shock,” even though this is their parent, because they don’t recognize that face and and even if they met them as an infant, even into two or three now because they have the ability to recognize faces. This one doesn’t look familiar. It’s scary.

Stefanie Bautista 4:19
Yes.

Ariel Landrum 4:20
I mentioned that because the reunification process with families is like really informing the service member that that this is a likely thing to happen and it has nothing to do with a rejection to you. It has everything to do with the baby doesn’t know you doesn’t know your face.

Stefanie Bautista 4:37
It’s just not familiar. And those are the things that he was experiencing during COVID because his dad was on mission and he was traveling to different parts of California. So there were stretches of time, weeks, months that he didn’t see him and then when we were reunited together, he was really only going by his sense of smell, I think. And it took maybe like a couple minutes, maybe sometimes an hour. Sometimes a couple hours for him to really get used to the fact that this is not a stranger. This is somebody who I can trust. And somebody who kind of smells like me, but not really. Especially since he’s had been, you know, my husband had been living in a hotel for a lot of these months out of the year. So he kind of have that hotel smell? For a while. And um, you know, it wasn’t necessarily that skin to skin smell that they probably that my son was used to right after birth. But yeah, that’s a real thing. And this, this could have been a very different situation had, we had not set up the correct parameters. And I think just to set up for our listeners context, my son is 14 months old. So he’s a little over a year. He’s beginning to say some words, not a lot, he knows some sign language when it comes to food. So he knows when to ask for more. He knows when he’s done, we know his nonverbal cues when he’s finished eating, when he’s cranky. We’ve we’ve kind of gone through these routines with him, not just at home, but when we eat at restaurants outside. So really, that was a lot of context that I was bringing into coming into Disneyland. And thankfully, kind of thankfully, that we had been traveling so much during the pandemic, visiting his dad over at his hotels, I was used to putting him in the car, those things don’t bother him anymore, because he had been conditioned to know that that’s a normal thing. So that in itself was easy for me to transition to because he had had those experiences.

Ariel Landrum 6:37
Yeah, I think that’s a really good thing to note. Because sometimes, and particularly new parents, or parents that haven’t been around a lot of children but just their own, forget the aware...