Anxiously Preparing for Disney

In 34 more days, my family will be heading to Orlando, FL.  Chris and I have been to Disney World before, but our children have not and this will be our first time going together AND our first time as parents.  Harlee is 7 and Jaxon is 3 and since we are hoping for another child, it was important for us to take Harlee before she got "too old" for princesses, to take Jaxon while he is still so completely Toy Story obsessed and to go before we one day (hopefully) welcome another life into our family.  I am excited, to say the least. My husband told Harlee & Jaxon, "Ya'll better watch out when we get there, Mom might run you over!" :) I admit, I am still a kid at heart... probably always will be. Well yesterday, our luggage tags and a package of vouchers arrived and I think I am in double overtime excitement!

Either way, as I mentioned earlier, this is my first time going as an adult... and a parent. That means that this is the first time I have had to prepare, pack, FOOT THE BILL (that hurt!) and make the experience as fun and memorable as I can from start to finish for my kids.  In the Knezevich Family, we try to do a fun family craft or activity once a week. Sometimes it's baking and sometimes it is actually getting crafty but for Disney, our craft took us a grand total of 4 evenings.  Harlee kept asking "How many more days until Disney?" and Jaxon kept asking, "Are we going to Pizza Planet today?"  So I decided it might be fun to make a paper chain to count down the days to Disney.  Well, of course, we couldn't do any ordinary chain, so at the 54 day countdown mark we started working on the "50 Days Until Disney Countdown Chain."  I cut 50 strips and we drew on each strip a theme from our favorite Disney movies.  I have to take a minute to brag on how artistically talented my little family is! (Jaxon being 3 didn't do anything much more than a scribble here and there, but we used a few of his anyway!) :)  Anyway, these are a few shots of our chain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 This last one I had to add in here because it was done by my cousin, Julia. I was showing her during a family gathering what we were doing and she snuck in and added the "Tale As Old As Time" Beauty and the Beast themed one to our pile.  She will also be joining us on our first Dinsey trip so it was PERFECT!  The crazy thing was, I was working on my Beauty and The Beast themed one when Harlee said, "Hey, where did this one come from??"  CRAZY! Thanks Julia!  After our trip is over and we have a TON of pictures (I'm sure), we will be creating a family scrapbook of our first Disney trip and we are saving the strips to use as scrapbook decoration.  We will have a lot of fun memories of our Disney trip,  but I also want to remember the fun (and laughs) that we shared making this chain. Speaking of laughs, one of them was due to my lumpy Mrs. Potts as pictured above! :)

 

 The kids and I are also creating a rubbermaid bin (slightly bigger than the shoe box sized ones) that we are dubbing our "Travel Box."  We will pack coloring books, crayons, DSi & games, kindle etc. We have a rule that if it doesn't fit in the box, it doesn't go!  I am going to paint the top with chalkboard paint and pack a little bit of chalk so the kids can play tic tac toe on top or something like that! Victor (my 7 year old brother in law) will also be going with us, so that will be good for him and Harlee.   Anyone out there have anymore advice or tips for us?  We are going November 7-11.  We have already made all hotel and dining reservations. We will be spending 2 days at Magic Kingdom & 1 day at Hollywood Studios.