Get Up We're Going to Disney World!!

We'd been planning our vacation for this year forever. It was a 4 night Disney cruise - you know we LOVE a Disney cruise and a bunch of our family decided to tag along. Literally we started planning over a year ago s it seemed forever in the making! About 7 months ago when Disney announced Free Dining for March dates I mentioned to Paul that, in the name of research for my job, we ought to go down to Florida a few days early and go to the parks. Since we've cruised the past few Disney vacations we've had it's been a while since we've been to the parks. Paul initially dismissed my idea but eventually came around (as is true of most of my ideas), since it was, you know, in the name of research for my job (i.e. tax write off). We decided to keep the extra trip a secret from the kids which was really easy to do up until the day before we left! Ha! At exactly 7am 180 days before our trip I made all our dining reservations and scored some of the hottest restaurants in all of Lake Buena Vista. Then the countdown began.

Erin & Tom decided to come down a few days early too and then they decided to drive to FL and our house happened to be a good stopping point and saved them some $$ on a hotel room. So they arrived on Wed. 3/28. We told the kids they were just stopping by on their way to Disney and Lily promptly started begging to go with them. I started packing that day (I told the kids I might as well pack since I was doing laundry and they seemed to buy it). It was a bit hard to sneak extra clothes into a separate suitcase and all was going swimmingly until the 9 year old had to ask. I told her I was breaking up the clothes in case a bag got lost. She looked slightly perplexed but didn't ask further questions. Phew!

Erin & Tom arrived at dinner time and we enjoyed a nice visit with them that evening as we packed up the car after the kids went to bed. The plan was to be up at 4am and leave in time to be at Dunkin Donuts for their 5am opening to get donuts and coffee for the road. We got up and got the last minute stuff packed and then began the rounds of waking up the kids. We started with Lily and I really wanted to video the whole thing but I'd already packed the little video camera (which I never used) so I tried my phone. Needless to say it didn't come out good. Boo hoo. Anyway..Paul woke up Lily and said "we decided to go ahead and go to Disney today..want to get up and go?" She sort of looked at him funny then said Ok and gave him a hug. It was pretty cute. I think had she been more awake we'd have had some more excitement but it was 4:35am. Next we woke up Emma and Julia and they pretty much had the same reaction.."ok..let's go." Then we got Jacob and just put him in the car. Paul had this great idea that they were going to just go back to sleep since it was so early. Apparently he'd forgotten these were our children he was talking about...the no sleep in the car kids. And 5 minutes after we started the journey they were wide awake and Emma was talking a mile a minute. Good plan pops.

Thankfully we had Erin and Tom caravaning with us. So the girls ended up switching cars and every stop mixing it up quite a bit. We had a lot of stops too but we made it, without incident to Walt Disney World by about 3:30pm! We weren't staying at the same resort so we bid farewll to them at their resort, Coronado Springs and then we headed to our luxurious accommodations at the All Star Music Resort. The family suite we stayed in was not fancy but fit the bill and the kids loved it! Two kids shared a bed - Jacob & Emma and Lily & Julia both got pull outs.

For dinner Thursday night we went to O'Hana at the Polynesian. Oh. My. Goodness was it good. Now we knew we were headed to Disney in the middle of Spring Break madness but I have to say it wasn't as bad as I expected. We arrived a few minutes before our scheduled dinner time and promptly at the scheduled time they called us back. O'hana has some really delicious food and the service was excellent. It quickly became one of our favs at Disney!

After dinner we rode the monorail back to Magic Kindgom and then the bus to our resort where Julia promptly fell asleep. It was a really long day but we were all so happy to be there it didn't matter. Everyone fell asleep pretty quickly and excited about our next day adventure to Magic Kingdom.