Where Dreams Come True

This past weekend, my mom and I took the kiddos to the most magical place on earth! DISNEY!!! It was kind of a spur of the moment trip. Kevin had a work retreat out of town and I do not like being home by ourselves without him. My mom mentioned going to Disney and we were totally game. We drove down Friday and stayed two nights. Saturday we did the Magic Kingdom. What we didn't realize was that the 1/2 marathon was going on that day. We were told not even to try to go anywhere near Downtown Disney or the Kingdom until after 11. We were kinda bummed because we were planning on getting to the park when it opened. It worked out though to be a little lazy that morning because I had the worst night the night before. My kids do not take well to change. We really don't do many vacations because Karsyn has a really hard time adjusting to the surroundings when going to bed. I brought the pack and play and tried putting her down in it. She just cried and cried. Kaden was also having a difficult time that night going to sleep on his own. I decided for the sake of all of us I would have them sleep in the bed with me. It was probably about 2am when I had to have my mom come and get Kaden and bring him in her room. Karsyn was ALL over the place in the bed and I didn't want her waking him up. It wasn't until 4am that I probably went to sleep. I ended up at that point switching rooms with my mom because Karsyn still had yet to really sleep for any long length of time. My mom was so awesome to let me sleep in a bit the next morning even though I wasn't really sleeping because I was too excited to go to the Kingdom. We left the condo a little after 10. I was expecting the park to be incredibly crowded. When we got there and parked, we realized that we were too close to the ticket booth that we didn't have the option to ride the tram. At that point we didn't think we were going to have to fight the crowds once inside the park. Kaden's all time favorite ride was the monorail. We ended up riding the resort monorail because the express was not up and running at the time. It worked out great because we got to stay on it longer which made for one happy little boy. He told my mom that he could ride the monorail forever. When we got into the Kingdom, our first ride was the train. Kaden kept asking and asking to ride the train. We had a little bit of technical difficulty getting on it with the strollers and my mom and I were slightly frustrated with each other but once we were off the train and we got the strollers under control our moods quickly shifted to excitement. Kaden saw an airplane roller coaster which was Goofy's Barnstormer ride. Karsyn was not tall enough to ride with a grown up so her and my mom strolled around Fantasyland while Kaden and I rode the ride. Kaden had a smile on his face the entire time. He was in awe of everything about Disney at this point. It literally brought tears to my eyes. After that we tried to ride all the rides that we could possibly ride. My goal was to get as many autographs and pictures with the characters as we could. We ended up seeing Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, Marie from Arsitocats, The White Rabbit from Alice In Wonderland, Tinkerbell, and Periwinkle. There were a few others that would have been nice to get the pictures and autographs but I don't think waiting in line would have sit well with the kids. Karsyn got a little antsy waiting in some of the lines. Kaden did pretty good. He would usually find some little kid standing next to us and chat them up the whole time. Our wait time was great. I think the longest we waited in line was MAYBE 20 minutes. We did a few fast passes which got us into some of the bigger rides quicker. Once on the rides the kids were amazing! They were the best behaved kids. Both of them would either sit in our laps or sit next to us and just look at everything that was around them. They never once fussed or cried. They never tried to stand up on the ride or climb out. We even did the Haunted Mansion and they both were so brave! We were at the park for about 8 hours. We left shortly before the magical light parade so we could skip the crowd. By this time both kids and my mom and I were beat! From not having much sleep the night before and not taking naps it was probably best that we didn't stay for the fireworks. We ended up picking up pizza from Uno's and taking it back to the condo. From there we were able to watch the fireworks from our balcony. The kids and I slept really well that night. We left the next morning. Kevin was home by the time we got back and we all were happy to be together again!