I have been so stinking excited to blog about our time at Disney! There is so much I want to share. I've been uploading pictures for the last week, it seems. And we did the photo pass (I'll share more about this in a minute), so we had to wait for our CD to come in the mail. I think for my memory purposes, I will do a post on each of the four parks, rather than each day because that would be a whole lot of blogging, ha! I do want to share a little about our planning and getting ready for our big trip first. This was our very first family vacation, just us. Most holidays, we travel to see family, or we go on vacation with family, which is awesome, too! David and I talked several times about how we felt like after this trip we were really parents. Or we had reached a new level of parenting. Crazy, I know. But, we were completely responsible for everything the whole time. That's a daunting task with four little people. We did all come back in one piece, and we were all safe the entire time we were there! We did work with a travel agent for all of our planning purposes. Her name is Lacey, and she is local here in Hattiesburg, but she is able to work with people all over. I cannot recommend her services enough! She works for a company, Family Fun Travels, and her services to us were FREE! I know! She planned everything for us, with as much input from us as we wanted. And, while we were there, she sent us frequent text messages telling us the best places to hit up at each park. I told her after our trip it felt like we had our own personal Disney Siri! Please let me know if you would like to have her information. I would love to share it. For our trip, we stayed at Port Orleans. It was perfect for our party of six. The room had two king beds, a Murphy bed, and they brought a pack and play out for Story. Everyone had plenty of room. Now, when our fab four are teenagers, I'm not sure it would work so well, but it was perfect for this season of our life!
This is the very first picture we took as soon as we entered Magic Kingdom for the first time. We opted to do the Photo Pass, which I highly recommend. It's significantly cheaper if you sign up to do it before your trip starts, and it's well worth it. We only did the regular photo pass, but when we go again, we will definitely do the Photo Pass Plus. Prior to our trip, we didn't know there were two options. The Plus one allows you to have all the pictures you take at character meals as well. We did several character meals, so this would have been nice. For those of you who have no clue about what in the world the photo pass is, there are people, trained photographers at each park, and you give them your photo pass card to scan, they take your pictures, as many as you want, and at the end of your trip, you get a CD in the mail with all of your pictures. So glad we did this!
During our time at Disney, we hit up all four parks, going to Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom twice. We have decided in the future, it is worth it to us to purchase the hopper pass, so we are not confined to one park the entire day. We scheduled our trip on what was supposed to be the least crowded week of the entire year, but it turned out to be quite crowded, and I think the hopper pass would have come in handy. We rented a double stroller from Kingdom Strollers, and this worked out so well. They delivered our stroller to our hotel (Port Orleans), and we had it at our disposal for the week. They were also much cheaper than renting directly from the parks.
Prior to our trip, I ordered tattoos for the children with our phone number on them. This eased my mommy heart so much while we were traveling around the park. We got them here. Highly recommend. For packing, my rockstar husband came up with the idea to pack all of the children's clothes, everything for each day in a gallon Ziploc bag. This made our time there so easy because we just pulled out each child's bag for the day, and they had everything they needed. I have seen some similar posts on pinterest about doing this as well. We were able to fit clothing for all the children for the entire week in one suitcase! This left plenty of room for souvenirs, ha!
One of my very favorite parts of the week was playing Tinkerbell each night. Before our trip, my friend, Alisa and I went to the dollar store and bought a bunch of treats for the children. Each night once the children were asleep, I put out a little treat from Tinkerbell for the day. They loved waking up each morning with a gift from Tinkerbell, and I loved coming home each night to clean room from Tinkerbell. I wish we could have brought her home with us! I highly recommend hitting up the dollar store before your trip. I found autograph books for each child, and they were $9-10 at the parks. We had the most amazing week. I can't wait to share some of our favorites from each park. Next up, Magic Kingdom!
No comments:
Post a Comment