A Seed was planted PTR About This Page:

[mcc0313]

I love the idea of the invitation to breakfast at CRT, I think Abby will love it.

[CinderAbby]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions and comments - and for sticking with me. I know I haven't been posting this as quickly as I have in the past.

[CinderAbby]

I’m all set. Or am I??

Even though it seemed like I was all set, I really wasn’t. I hadn’t touched my packing list. Every time we travel, I revise it when we get home but I always make changes to it when a new trip comes around. Kind of defeats the purpose of revising it when we get home, but it’s a vicious circle - I take one thing off and add back two more. I also wasn’t all set on clothing for our trip - I didn’t know what we had. I did eventually drag out all our vacation clothing and made Lenny help me make a list of what we had. Turns out I had more clothes than I thought so we were relatively set in that department. And what’s so funny about that is Lenny mentioned while going through the clothes that it would be neat to wear matching clothes like other people we’ve seen at the parks.

Some of the answers I got for my celebrations questions was to do matching t-shirts saying what we were celebrating - and I gave it some thought. But in the midst of all my questions about different things (including the celebrations) , I started to get to know Kim on here at PP. Not only did she give me a lot of different tips about other things, but she also had some great ideas for t-shirts for us. And then I really took to the idea. On my own, I don’t really have imagination so I couldn’t make shirts on my own. So with a ton of help from her (I still can’t thank you enough Kim), I had a lot of t-shirts to make. I was having so much fun doing it too. I’m not creative but Kim is and the designs she came up with were just unbelievable. She’d send me a design and together we’d tweak it for us (me, Lenny, and Abby). And every time I printed off an iron on and then used it, you just wouldn’t believe the size of the smile on Abby’s face. And even Lenny got in on the act. He had a bunch of Disney iron ons he got from somewhere (I don’t remember where) so he printed some off. A couple were a little small IMO - one had the fairies, the other had the princesses. Abby really lucked out last year. We went to see the fairies twice. The first time we saw Tink, Rosetta and Silvermist. The second time we saw Tink, Iridessa and Fawn so we were able to get all their signatures. It’s weird how things work but because I remembered that and the thought came to me that I should make the graphics appear larger by adding the signatures for the characters onto the shirts. Over the years, we’ve also been able to get all the Princesses too.

Now all of that didn’t go 100 percent smooth. I did make a few mistakes but at least Abby didn’t see them - she probably would have been upset if she had. But when all was said and done, I ended up with a total of 19 shirts that I made. And it also ended with Lenny saying "you have to watch what you wish for." When he made his comment about the matching shirts, we didn’t have any at the time. I don’t think Lenny thought I would actually do it either. He knew I didn’t want to spend a ton of money on clothes as he and I didn’t need any and Abby didn’t need many. But that was the beauty of making shirts - they were really cheap at the craft store and one tank of ink made all 19 (not including the boo-boos I made). I ended up spending a lot less than I would have if I had bought even just 1 set of matching shirts for us.

So while I was making progress on the shirts, there really wasn’t a heck of a lot for me to do. We’re not really getting pennies this year so planning that out wasn’t going to take long. Abby wants to find Hidden Mickey’s instead this year but I have a book mom bought me a couple of years ago. We’ll keep our eyes out and use the book but we’re not going crazy so there was nothing to get ready for that. I wanted to print my tip envelopes but for some reason I had a lot of trouble looking for them so I thought about not doing them at all this year. I finally changed my mind and with some help from Abby, it didn’t take too long to make new ones from scratch. Like last year, as soon as Abby was done making them, she wanted to fill them but I had nothing to fill them with so we just put them aside.

[CinderAbby]

Now I’m back on track.

Things were finally coming together but I still felt like I had stuff left to do for Disney. There really wasn’t much left though, so I found things to do. Abby loves mazes and I have a three ring binder that I keep in the truck for her with all sorts of mazes and color by number things I’ve printed from online. So I went through that and took out the old mazes she did and reprinted new ones. The ironic part in that? When I print the mazes, I don’t get fussy about them so I let the headers and footers print and the mazes Abby didn’t use last year were dated the same exact time frame as the ones I printed this year. I also found a new website that had a bunch so I printed her off some completely new ones too. Abby also decided she wanted a picture itinerary like she had last year so I worked on revising that for this year too. Once I was done with that, I started looking over all my spreadsheets and books that I had made. I was beginning to think I was done when I realized something. I have a 4x6 size book that I made for our vacation in 2006 for Abby to look over but now I use it. I update it in the months leading up to our vacations to make sure everything is relatively current and in it I have a mini version of our itinerary, our ADR numbers, park hours, things like that plus counter service menus. In looking it over, it occurred to me that I never looked into our counter service options at the water parks.

For those wondering why I take counter service menus with us, it’s for Abby. Having them as a reference, I know where there are places that definitely have something Abby will eat. Once in the parks instead of going to a restaurant and finding out there is nothing that Abby will eat, when we’re hungry, I can take out my book and find out right away where a good place to eat will be. So instead of walking around the park trying to "find" someplace that Abby will eat at (and thereby making those of us who are already grumpy from hunger even grumpier), we can just head to one place and be done with it (and avoid even more grumpiness) . So while it may seem anal or over the top having the menus with me, for us it just makes life easier. And with the size I made it (even with the "mini" menus), it’s still small enough to fit either in my purse or in Lenny’s scooter basket.

So once I saw I neglected to add water park CS menus to my book, I got started on that right away. I just had to be careful though. With all my pages with dining menus and ADR numbers, I had to make sure Abby didn’t start reading them. She still had no idea about Cinderella’s Royal Table and I didn’t want her to find out early. Since there’s not a lot of options at the water parks, that task took next to no time to finish. By the time I was done with everything, we were just under 60 days left to go and for the first time in months, I really felt that I was on track and pretty much ready to go with the exception of one thing: packing.

[lazanya]

Good for you Darlene getting back on track!
Congrats on the t-shirts!
I too like to have copies of the CS restaurants menus on me so that way it is so much easier for me to plan ahead on what I'm going to eat with me being on WW and having food intolerances.

[PamelaK]

I love the idea of printing counter service menus! I know there are certain things we just sort of crave while we are there and it would be great to be able to just look int he book and see where to go.

It sounds like your t-shirts turned out awesome. I can't wait to see the pictures of them while you are at WDW.

[KMB733]

That's a great idea to print out the menus. That is a tip I will have to remember for next time. The tshirts sound like they turned out great!

[Cam22]

Great work on the shirts! Neat idea on the CS menus, too.

[chezp]

Glad you're back on track!

[Wolfy6688]

I'm so excited you're going and there'll be another PTR and TR!! I was absolutely blown away by your pressed penny collection. I was impressed beyond words. Even without that though, I loved reading your TR.

I also don't like sitting in a tube in the water parks. It's okay for a little bit, but I like to be half in the tube and walking along the bottom of the pool.

I like all your ADR choices - they look really good and really fun.

I have never made shirts myself, but my cousin and aunt are going in October. Not only did they make a whole bunch of iron on shirts, they did some tie-dye shirts with Mickey heads in the center. They look awesome, and it's such a great idea. Much better than spending money on new shirts for everybody.

I also wasn't that impressed with LMA. It was okay I guess. I'm not sure what I expected, but it was kind of blah.

I bet you guys will love the water parks. I'm not big on water slides, and I had a great time.

Can't wait to read more! That's so wonderful that you're able to take an unexpected trip.

[B.M.]

I analyze the CS menus also; for the same reason as you- making sure my kids will eat it!

[Colexis Mom]

Congrats on the t-shirts! Great idea on the menus. We just got back from DL, and I could link to Allears on my phone for the menus, and it really made it easier trying to figure out where to eat!

[CinderAbby]

Is it time to pack yet?

With only 50 something days left, I could have started packing but I chose not to. With pool parties and beach visits planned between then and now, I didn’t want to find out I had packed something that I needed so I just stuck with my (somewhat) organized piles of things to pack that I started in the spare room back when I booked the vacation (that was back in March). I don’t mind pulling from the piles but once something goes into a suitcase, I hate to pull it out. So with no packing to do, I spent some time organizing Abby’s DVD discs. Over the past few years, there always seems to be movies and half hour programs that Abby really enjoys so with the combination of our DVD recorder and a computer program we have that came with our camcorder, I made some new recordings for her to watch and then organized some of the older ones too. That alone was a very time consuming process but it kept me busy and kept me from rethinking our vacation plans too much (every so often I was tempted to change some of our ADR’s even at that late date).

And then it happened. I had one too many mornings of Abby being really tired and not wanting to get out of bed. I had visions of that happening in Disney and I just couldn’t get it out of my head that my all breakfast plans for this year were not going to work. So now matter how hard I tried to push the thought out of my head, it kept coming back and I seriously started to rethink our ADR’s. On our 45 day mark, I finally sat down and started to think how this would work and I figured okay, maybe we can leave the parks early every night. Abby wanted to last year - there wasn’t a single night that we actually were in a park to see any kind of fireworks. Then I started thinking that Lenny may be a pain and try to "convince" Abby that she doesn’t want to leave. Being caught in the middle of a child that wants to leave and an overgrown child who wants to stay isn’t my idea of a good ending to the night so after hashing some things out with my friends here, I went to Disney.com. I swear the Dining Gods were smiling down on us this trip. Every time I went online or called Disney Dining, we got what we wanted within a few minutes of when we wanted. This last time was no exception.

We had a late breakfast ADR once and while there was plenty of food, we saw the characters briefly and once they were done with our section of the restaurant, they were gone for good so because of that, we’ve decided we much, much prefer the earliest seating for whatever meal we’re going to. Not expecting much, I looked at Disney Dining and found not only an early lunch seating at Akershus (about 20 minutes after lunch starts) but also one at CP (15 minutes after lunch starts). I couldn’t believe it - and our vacation was only 45 days away. Before I did anything, I asked Abby which meal she would prefer and I finally got the answer I was actually hoping for when I originally made our ADR’s - she wanted the later lunch meals instead of breakfast. So while I was on the phone booking the new Akershus meal and canceling the old one, I was booking the new CP meal online (is this a new form of Disney multi-tasking??).

Our latest dining ADR’s looked like this:

8/9 - arrival day - Trails End Buffet lunch at 12:30
8/10 - MK day - CRT at 8:20 am
8/11 - AK day - Tusker House at 8:15 am
8/12 - Epcot day - Akershus at 12:05 pm
8/13 - DHS day - Garden Grill at 4:05 pm
8/14 - ??? - CP at 11:45 am
8/15 - ??? - Ohana at 8:55 am
8/16 - ??? - 1900 PF at 4:30 pm
8/17 - Lenny’s b’day - CM at 8:15 am and Trails End at 4:30 pm

　
Now with those changes made, it was back to my itinerary to fix that up and it was relatively easy - it took me all of 5 minutes - thankfully. I wasn’t looking forward to having to move a lot of things around but since I kept the same restaurants on the same day, it was just a matter of shuffling just a couple of things (and with a time line error on one of the days that I didn’t originally catch, that was a huge help too). And I felt really good too. With the new plans, we had a good balance of early mornings for breakfasts and later mornings with lunches and a dinner planned. While I still may have to wake her up on breakfast mornings, at least now it won’t be every single morning. And as for Lenny, because of his crankiness from last year due to hunger, he won’t get the pleasure to sleep in. I’ll make sure he gets up early every morning, but on the later mornings when Abby gets to sleep in, Lenny will be able to have a food court breakfast to start the day with (which will hopefully make up for the fact I’m making him get up).

Then Abby said something about seeing the day parades this year....

[CinderAbby]

More changes??

I was now at 42 days by this point in time. My packing list was still sitting, basically shoved aside for yet another day and now I was redoing my itinerary for the umpteenth time. The changes this time weren't quite so easy as a few days before. When I really looked at it, I had us starting at Epcot one day for breakfast (which then I changed to lunch) then going to DHS, the next day I had us going to DHS and having dinner at Epcot. I don’t know why I did that but I finally switched those days so all we do is hop from DHS for our meal and then back and the next day we’ll stay all day at Epcot. Then with a time for meeting Danielle and her hubby Tom and the official announcement of TSM and One Man’s Dream being closed on the 16th instead of the 15th like I thought, I switched a couple of more days. Then Abby mentioned wanting to see the parades this year. I never even gave them a thought except for Mickey’s Jammin Jungle Parade - that one I had scheduled in - so now I had to try and fit them in. I ended up getting really, really overwhelmed and confused (I’m sure the heat we were experiencing wasn’t helping) as to what we wanted to do and when. I really wanted to just throw out the whole itinerary and start from scratch. That wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere though.

After several attempts to move things around, I just couldn’t seem to do it and I talked to Lenny and he told me the one thing I had been telling myself - it was time to ditch the itinerary I had and start from scratch again. Just the though was very depressing and headache inducing but I had a reprieve. The reprieve was good on one hand as it forced me to put Disney aside and do other things, but on the other it was bad because it was our refridgerator. It had been acting up for a couple of weeks but we finally had to admit it was time to replace it. So instead of trying to work on Disney, I spent time online looking for fridges then went out looking with mom. We finally found something I really liked (yes, it’s mom’s house but she left the final decision up to me) and while we were at it we also replaced the dying dishwasher and the stove. There was nothing wrong with the stove but mom wanted one of the new ones with a cooktop instead of coils. After spending many, many hours away from Disney planning, when I sat down to it again, I actually felt ready to start over.

One thing Lenny suggested to me when he said start over was to put down our "time sensitive" things (ADR’s, parades, shows we want to see, etc) first then build everything else out around that. Usually I do that with our meals, but I never did it with the shows so I tried it Lenny’s way. It really worked well and I liked doing that as it really seemed easier. But then something started to trip me up - namely fitting in the water parks. But instead of letting that get the best of me, I did two itineraries for each day. One with leaving and going to the water parks, one staying in the parks for the shows, etc. Things seemed to go smoothly and quickly doing two different (yet similar) itineraries for each day. And when I printed them off, I cut the paper in half so we could compare the differences side by side. Doing it that way, I quickly saw which way I preferred the days and I think it was easier on Abby as she gave me her opinions, some of which were very unexpected to me. I also did the same with Lenny and I really think for the first time since I wrote our first itinerary (whenever that was now) we all actually were agreeing on it.

Being in agreement on this latest itinerary, I had to call Disney and change our dining.....again. But this was a very easy change - I just had to cancel our first Trails End meal which we decided to skip. Our first day, we’ll take it easy and just do a quick meal for both lunch and dinner either at the AS Sports food court or at McDonalds which both Lenny and Abby want to check out. I also had to go back and update not only my 4x6 book but also Abby’s picture itinerary. With Abby back in school by this point in time and trying to catch up on cleaning and other things that are difficult with Abby at home, I only worked on it a bit at a time so it took me a few days, but I did eventually get finished. Then a few things happened that I’m not going to mention other than to say a lot of my Disney things got tossed into the trash and that set me back a quite few days (and pretty much killed my excitement for the trip). Then at 24 days I received our Disney mail - talk about pressure. I wasn’t happy with the trip (and was really close to canceling) and I didn’t want to redo anything but I had to. The overplannner in me just couldn’t say the heck with it and what happens, happens. So I started to redo all my things that had gotten tossed. I wasn’t happy doing it and it didn’t give me any excitement like it had in the past but I did it. It took a few days, but I finally was at the point that I only had one thing left to do - pack (FINALLY).

[Colexis Mom]

Sorry for all the changes Darlene!!