Perfecting Our Screams

You’d think that, with an opera singer father, my children would be the loudest and shriekiest children on Earth, and this may be true, but did Michael Jordan stop practicing when he was on top?  Did Pavarotti forego warm-ups, simply because he was just so good that, hey, who cares?  NO!  If you want to stay on the top of your game, you have to keep in shape.  And there is only one place on the planet for perfectly practicing your terrible screaming: the amusement park.

It was a two hour drive to Six Flags: Great Escape, so we had plenty of warm-up time in the car.  Despite pleas of inside voices, the children ran through their shrieking exercises while their sonic booms blasted other cars off of the road and into ditches.  And to add to the chaos fun, we had also kidnapped our neighbor Mecca and her son Vulian, so there were three children in the car instead of the usual two.  Yes, this was going to be a day of epic noise.

If you thought the on-the-way screams were good, you should have heard the I-can-see-the-park screams.  And if you did hear the I-can-see-the-park screams, and thought those were as good as it gets, well then you were clearly not sitting next to Edward on his first roller-coaster.  He was so excited to ride it, so not excited to wait in line for an hour, and then so excited again when he was finally strapped into that free-rolling bucket of terror.  As we clicked up to the top of the drop, he informed me that, actually, he did not want to do it after all and he would prefer to exit the ride.  About three seconds later he completely perfected his scream.

By the time we finished the ride, he had changed his mind again.  “That was awesome!” he declared to the ride operator.  “Thanks for the ride.  Have a nice day!  I was soooooo brave!”  And so we went on more rides, and the screams got louder and louder, until the ride home when everyone passed out.  Now we are in peak screaming condition.  Be warned.