Wright Brothers vs. Disney?

Darcy is becoming a great rock climber, as she demonstrated a few days.

You know how people (by which I mean middle school and high school boys, really) like to pose the question, "Who would win a fight, Batman or Spiderman?" The question I pose in this post is, "Who would win a fight, the Wright Brothers or Disney characters?"

Darcy hasn't had a lot of exposure to Disney movies or characters before our trip to Disneyland. She's had a Mickey Mouse doll for a long time (courtesy, I think, of Dan and Betty) that she ignored until two days ago. Yesterday, she slept with Mickey (she refers to him as "the Disneyland mouse", or she did before yesterday anyway) at nap and at night. Both times, she fell right asleep with no fussing, no songs, no second visits by Michael or me to her room. That NEVER happens and I do mean never. I don't believe I have ever gotten her to sleep for her nap without songs before.

Given all that, I had some hope that the Disneyland trip might finally be the new thing that loosens the hold the Wright Brothers have on our girl's imagination. The answer to the inspirational question for this post seemed to be that Disney characters would win.

But those pesky Wright Brothers! Persistence is always mentioned as one of the character traits that made them successful, so I shouldn't have been so quick to count them out. Yesterday afternoon, I started noticing that Mickey was being called Will an awful lot and by bedtime, he WAS Will. Today, we went to town to drop Michael at the airport and Darcy insisted that both Wilbur and Orville had to go -- and she wasn't talking about Michael and me (although we are both still Orv and Will). Mickey/Will and Orv (represented by a blue-clothed doll) play acted the most important scenes of the Wright Brothers story over and over in the car. They crashed. They played out the whole typhoid scenario. And on the ride home, I kept hearing Mickey/Will say, "I love scrapping with you, Orv. You're such a good scrapper!" This quotation (usually, "I love scrapping with Orv. He's such a good scrapper!") shows up in a lot of biographies when talking about how the Wright Brothers argued about things all the time.

Darcy has taken the most-recognized mascot of Disneyland and turned him into a Wright Brother. My conclusion: The Wright Brothers win. My other conclusion? We're going to be living with Will and Orv for quite a while longer.

I'm going to give them their very own tag. Sigh.