If You Can Dream It, You Can Do It

[chaffey]

Welcome back Kate,

So much for my early night

i was only thinking about you the other day when we were at Bluewater and saw that the Cadburys shop had shut down.

Sorry that the end of 2011 was a bit difficult but glad that 2012 has brought some happy times.

Look forward to reading more about your plans as they develop.

Ps the girls loved the tea party with Alice following your recommendations.

Glad you're back

Tracey
xx

[Guest]

[QUOTE=chaffey;7415813]Welcome back Kate,

So much for my early night

i was only thinking about you the other day when we were at Bluewater and saw that the Cadburys shop had shut down.

Sorry that the end of 2011 was a bit difficult but glad that 2012 has brought some happy times.

Look forward to reading more about your plans as they develop.

Ps the girls loved the tea party with Alice following your recommendations.

Glad you're back

Tracey
xx



Hi Tracey

Oh I'm loving that you saw a closed down chocolate shop and thought of me! and what's the deal with that anyway? I'm not very impressed , the girls and I used to love that place!

I'm so glad to hear that your girls enjoyed the tea party and I'm only sorry that I haven't been around to read your trip report properly. I do hope the rest of your holiday was equally as fabulous and I promise to somehow find the time to catch up with your trip report! I feel a bit overwhelmed actually with all the catching up that I need to do and I'm not really sure where to start! Ah well, I'm sure I'll get there!

Hope your gorgeous girls and the rest of the family are all well.

Kate xx

Glad you're back

[Mouse mess]

Hi Kate... good to have you back!

Thanks for the mention!

I had no idea you had deleted your trip report, I've been recommending it to people, haha!

Glad your dad is ok, it must have been scary for you all

We have so many things in comman reading your pre trippie! My DH works in construction too so I know exactly how it is, he's the FD and can get very stressed very often recently!


Really looking forward to part 2

Ps, my 2012 pre trippie is called let the adventure begin, I've realised how close it is to your 2011 title! Hope you're not offended, it's only a working title so will change when the main agent comes

[Guest]

Originally Posted by Mouse mess

Hi Kate... good to have you back!

Thanks for the mention!

I had no idea you had deleted your trip report, I've been recommending it to people, haha!

Glad your dad is ok, it must have been scary for you all

We have so many things in comman reading your pre trippie! My DH works in construction too so I know exactly how it is, he's the FD and can get very stressed very often recently!


Really looking forward to part 2

Ps, my 2012 pre trippie is called let the adventure begin, I've realised how close it is to your 2011 title! Hope you're not offended, it's only a working title so will change when the main agent comes

See more...

Hi Sophie

Lovely to hear from you again, hope you and the family are all well. I bet Noah and Emmie are growing up nearly as quickly as my 2!

Funnily enough, when I talked about the stress that comes with starting up a new business, I was mainly talking about me! Nothing in life seems to bother or stress Cliff (must be a lovely way to be!), which I guess means that the day I do see him stressed, is the day I should really worry lol!

Oh, and of course I'm not in the least bit offended I just need to try and now find the time catch up with everyone's pre-trippies! I'm so pleased that you're all returning very soon, I so enjoyed reading about your last holiday!

Take care

Kate xx

[Derryfam]

Hi Isabel

Welcome back to The Dibb! Its funny I thought i had noticed your avatar from before!

Its funny your family is just like mine! I'm a proper spender and my hubby is Mr Sensible LOL

Looking forward to reading the big reveal and following you trippee!

What a shame to delete your trip report byt hey a whole new one to come!

[gingermoonman]

Glad too see you back on the Dibb! You trip report gave me so many tips when we went last October (by the way great time of the year too go, we had 3 weeks of great weather with on day of drizzle! ) and we where lucky enough to do MNSSHP and MVMCP
When we came back I thought i would be terrible but was not too bad think Christmas approaching helped! But I did not go on the Dibb for a while! Over the last few weeks I have got terrible really missing it and I have got pictures at work which I think make things worse! Anyway nice to see you back and things have got better, I look forward to part 2 and how you surprise the girls!
PS Can you subscribe to people so when they start a new threat you get alerted or do you have to keep checking back?

[Guest]

Part 2 - 138 Days
The Big Reveal

I'm hoping to be able to do an update on my pre-trippie once a week, but because I'm a little late to starting my own pre-trip report a lot of my first few posts will be written retrospectively, so I'm just trying to bash a few of them out as quickly as I can so that I can catch up with myself and hopefully I'll be posting some more current updates soon!


So, the holiday was finally booked and, somehow, I had to try and keep it from the girls until we planned to reveal all to them at Easter. I honestly have no idea how some of you manage to do this until the day before the holiday (or even right up until the airport as I’ve seen in some cases!), as I was ready to burst from the moment we had the flights booked, and could hardly bear the fact that Cliff and I knew we were going to Florida this year yet the girls were none the wiser!

Disney, as you can probably imagine, is quite a regularly discussed topic in our household and, since returning last May, we would always discuss with the girls how much we wanted to go back, so they both knew that it was something we hoped to do in the near future. With the Easter holidays approaching in particular, the girls both started saying things like “Oh, do you remember how excited we were this time last year? We only had a couple of weeks until we went to Florida!”

They also knew that we didn’t have any other plans as yet for a summer holiday and so, as far they were concerned, Easter this year was looking a little gloomier than the previous one, when we were almost all beside ourselves with excitement! This is why I wanted to have the holiday booked in time, so that I could arrange an egg hunt for Easter Sunday and then reveal all!

Between booking the holiday and surprising the girls, it was only a mere matter of weeks for me to wait, but it felt like years to me, as I was so desperate to tell them our big secret! So I busied myself in my preparations for the egg hunt and the reveal to try and keep myself occupied.

A few months earlier I’d been browsing the Disney Store online (as you do!) and I’d come across a Mickey Mouse plush holding a plaque that you could get personalised – perfect! So with the holiday now booked, I happily returned to the Disney Store (hoping they still had these in stock) and ordered 2 of the Mickeys – personalised with ‘See you in October Isabel’ and ‘See you in October Amelia’. They were delivered about 3 days later, which I thought was very good for personalised items – how cute are they?!



I’d managed to get a large, plain box that would fit them both in (I didn’t want one of the girls to open a box before the other one and then give the game away to her sister!) and packed the Mickeys away with some Mickey Head sprinkles and lots of red tissue paper!

Since January I’d also been collecting for the girls the Disney Princess Charms to go on a charm bracelet (also from The Disney Store). They celebrate a different Disney Princess every month (and so release a different Princess charm each month accordingly), right up to Cinderella in October. Now, you may have noticed that I mentioned I started doing this in January, which was actually a couple of months before we even had the holiday booked, but seeing as the last Princess is to be released in October and October is the month that I was always hoping we would book to go, I saw it as a good omen and so decided to start collecting them anyway in the hope that my wishes would come true ha ha! I was going to give these to the girls as well, once they’d got over the main surprise, as I thought it was an extra nice way to count down to our holiday each month.







Next up, countdown charts. The girls absolutely loved having these last year, so I wanted them to have a different chart each month and give them April’s chart on Easter Sunday. They’re nothing particularly fancy, I just played around with some Disney images in Google and incorporated them into a table in Word, but I did a different theme for each month and you’ll see the girls holding up their first one in a photo below.

I then moved on to preparing a little DVD for the girls that I was going to put in the box with the Mickeys for them to find with the words ‘Play Me’ in a Mickey Head. The idea being that this was a film from Mickey inviting both Isabel and Amelia back to Disney in October and giving them all the details of when and where we were going, including photos of our villa and showing new attractions that will be in the parks etc. all set to some of their favourite music that always reminds them of Disney. When we returned from Disney last year, I made a DVD of our holiday that the girls have watched over and over again, so I was hoping that this was going to be a big hit with them!



You’ll probably laugh at this last idea, but I wanted to do a sweetie countdown as well, to give them a real generic sense of how many days were left until our holiday. I bought a good few bags of Haribo, Jelly Babies, Mr Men and other soft sweeties and set about counting! I’m such a lovely lady that I even took out all the yucky cola bottles and kept them to one side to give to Cliff (his fave! )! With the tub filled, I tied a Mickey ribbon around it and here was the finished result - it doesn't look that big, but it's a huge tub! (hopefully we’ll manage to avoid tooth decay before October! ).





So the Disney preparations were in place, I now needed to arrange the egg hunt. I had done something similar like this before which had worked out well, so decided to go with this idea again, that being the idea of the girls going around the garden with their baskets hunting for eggs and surprises and, with every surprise they collect, they also find a clue. The ‘clues’ are little laminated squares that I have made, with an Easter image on one side and a number on the other. At the beginning of the egg hunt I tell them how many clues there are in total to collect, so they know when they have them all and, when they’re done. I then hand them an Easter Code sheet, showing all of the different Easter images with a different letter next to each image. It’s then up to them to work out that the numbers on the back of the clues means that the clues need to be put in chronological order to then spell out where their main surprise is hidden – have I explained that properly or does that just sound overly complicated lol?!

So anyway, I was all set and good to go.

Every Easter Sunday we always spend the day at Mum and Dad’s, and Mum always puts on a lovely egg hunt for all of the grandchildren. It’s a great day, and one that we never want to miss. I love Easter, as it’s a bit like Christmas but without the stress of having to spend months beforehand buying everyone presents! Plus, Christmas for us last year had been somewhat different to say the least, so we were all looking forward to Granny’s turkey and all the trimmings at Easter this year more so than ever! So Cliff and I decided that we would do our egg hunt and ‘big reveal’ for the girls on Good Friday, so that we had plenty of time to enjoy both days.

Good Friday dawned and I woke up feeling sooo excited! I kept whispering to Cliff that by the time the girls go to bed tonight they’ll know that they’re going to Florida this year – eeeeekkk! We had breakfast and I tried to remain calm but I could honestly hardly eat a thing, I literally felt sick with excitement and I was actually shaking, I just wanted everything to go perfectly. The girls knew that they were having our egg hunt today and they were really excited about it, oh if only they knew.

Cliff’s one job was to take photographs and video everything and I must have checked with him a hundred times that he knew what he was doing and that he’d checked the camera! Finally the time of the egg hunt arrived, which was good because I thought I was about to pass out with excitement! The girls were made to go up to Isabel’s room and stay there until I came to get them, as they knew that I was hiding the clues.

The clues were hidden and then the girls were called downstairs and handed their Easter baskets and oh-so-trendy Easter deely boppers, which were mandatory to wear! I explained how many clues there were to collect and gave them their first one so they could see what sort of thing it was that they were looking for. I said that once they had all the clues to come back to the kitchen table, for the next part of the hunt. Then they were off!

I so enjoyed watching them zoom around looking for clues and the excitement on their faces each time they found one and called to the other to come see. It probably took them about 15 minutes to do the egg hunt and a further 15 minutes to work out all the clues at the kitchen table. Cliff filmed the whole 30 minutes of this and even we haven’t managed to sit down and watch the whole half an hour of an egg hunt, so I certainly won’t put you through that!

Finally, the part I had been waiting weeks for had arrived. The girls had assembled all their clues and thought that they then had to go and search in the dining room. Cliff and I went ahead of them so that we could still film them when they saw the large box. They saw it straightaway and both started ripping into it immediately. At this point my heart was in my mouth and I could actually feel my hands trembling.

They opened the box and excitedly yelled “Mickey!” happily presuming that the stuffed toy was their main prize. They reached in to pull a Mickey out each and realised that Mickey was holding a plaque so both started reading out loud. Before they realised what they’d read, they first realised that they’d picked out each other’s Mickey, but as they swapped Mickey mid-air, it suddenly dawned on them and Isabel yelled out “Oh my god are we going to Florida?! ”

All I could do was nod as, being the big girl’s blouse that I am, I had of course immediately welled up with tears on seeing their reaction! They both looked back at the Mickey again and then asked “What, really this October?”

We confirmed that, yes, we really were going back and their faces were a picture of absolute joy! Isabel immediately threw herself at me in a great big bear hug and Amelia did the same to Cliff. Unfortunately, in doing so, the camera also got knocked and so, from that point, the filming also stopped, but at least we have the best bit filmed!

Oh, the relief! I’d read so many reports of how parents have tried to surprise their children and how it just hadn’t really gone to plan or the children just hadn’t really got it straightaway, so I was a bit worried about how it would all go. Fortunately, I got just the reaction I was hoping for and the girls couldn’t have been more delighted, surprised or excited – it was a perfect moment!



Once the initial shock had worn off a bit, Isabel decided to see if there was anything else in the box (typical!). She found the ‘Play Me’ DVD and asked what it was. I just said why don’t you play it and find out. So the four of us went into the snug and watched the 10 minute film from Mickey. You can see that I’m still trying to wipe away tears – pathetic woman lol!



The girls loved the film and were actually the most excited when they saw the pictures of the villa, pool and bedrooms where we’ll be staying. Afterwards I then handed them their Princess charms, sweeties and countdown charts, they were very happy to be able to cross off the whole first row all in one go!



The rest of the day passed with the girls watching clips of their favourite rides on YouTube (as I remember us doing before we went last year) and Amelia immediately asked if we could measure her to see if she was tall enough for Hollywood Rip Ride Rock-It – yikes, looks as though I won’t be able to sit this one out with her this year! They also wanted to go onto the website where I booked the villa to get a better look and asked if they could print up photos of the bedrooms and pool so they could start their own Florida folder – oh what a proud moment for me lol!

We chatted into the evening about all of the characters they’d like to meet that they didn’t get to see last year and discussed which new restaurants we might like to try this year and which favourite ones we’d like to return to.

I asked them at bedtime if they’d had any idea that we’d be going to Florida this year. Isabel said that she thought we might be going back next year but never in a million years thought it would be this year! They went to bed that night dreaming of Disney and with their new Mickey on the end of their bed, which is pretty much where he’s stayed ever since!



Join me in Part 3 for ADR Time!

Thank you for reading.

Kate xx

[madhatter3]

Glad to see you back, loved your last trip report, we loved May to.
Can not wait to read all your plans for your next trip.
Like you I am a disney addict and a dibb addict as well.

Loved the start of your pre trip, and glad that every thing has settled down for you at home.

[Guest]

Originally Posted by Derryfam

Hi Isabel

Welcome back to The Dibb! Its funny I thought i had noticed your avatar from before!

Its funny your family is just like mine! I'm a proper spender and my hubby is Mr Sensible LOL

Looking forward to reading the big reveal and following you trippee!

What a shame to delete your trip report byt hey a whole new one to come!

See more...

Hi Cath

I remember posting on your pre-trippie last year as well and I see from your signature that you've got your trip report up, so that's another one to add to my ever-growing list of things to read!

Hope you enjoy the reveal, I just posted it!

Kate

[madhatter3]

omg you have me in tears, have only just read your last post, the huge grin on the girls faces says it all.

My reveal was nothing like yours, but like yourself I could not contain my excitement much longer and told the kids a few sundays back... Jake guessed it right away, but he had been spending hours looking at reveals on you tube.

The sweetie jar is a brill idea, think I may have to get one next easter, (not sure 530 sweets is a good idea now!).

You have given the girls memories that they will remember for the rest of their lives.