Team Groves are Florida Bound! October 2017 Day 1

[berniegroves]

*****So I am obviously 18 months behind schedule writing this report. oops. When we returned from the trip I had serious florida blues and couldn't face writing it immediately. I planned on starting in early 2018. But then we had a surprise and found out we'd be getting a new addition to our team! With morning sickness and our usual hectic lives the trip report got forgotten about. Especially considering we now wouldn't be visiting florida again until 2021 which seemed SO far away.
Our new arrival was born on 5th November (the same day as his big brother turned 5! So they share a birthday!) and the last 5 months have gone past in a blink!
Our next trip is still 2 years away but I realised we had some really magical moments on this trip and I wanted to record them somewhere for the kids to read when they are bigger.
So here we are. 18 months late. But better late than never.
If you do decide to read along I appreciate it
*******



Day 1:
Magic kingdom

I got a pretty decent sleep all things considered and I woke up at around 5ish. I was in bed with Miley so I didn’t get up but just lay there content in the knowledge we had 3 whole weeks in Florida ahead of us!
Miley woke up not long after and we got out of bed at 5.30.

We needed an early start today as we were heading to Magic Kingdom and had a breakfast reservation booked at Crystal Palace for 8.25. And we all know how lengthy the journey into MK is!

I had outfits for both the kids laid out for today, Grayson had a Winnie the Pooh tshirt and shorts and Miley had a dress I had made her out of a Winnie the Pooh fabric. They were both excited to be off to meet their first characters of the holiday! And I was excited to get some breakfast lasagne!
Getting ready in the morning always takes a lot longer than I would like. Me, Simon and Miley are not morning people and Grayson is a wild thing, so we all bumble around not accomplishing much really.

After making sure we had the essentials, tickets, spending money, camera etc we were heading out of the villa at 6.50am. It was still dark out which felt very odd!

It always feels like magic to be entering Disney property on that first morning!

After paying for parking we drove through to the Jafar car park which felt good. I love it when we are close to the front as we prefer not to get a tram.
With the kids in the stroller we took a fairly brisk walk over to the transportation centre and got in line for the monorail. We got on the next one and were on our way.

When we had initially booked our breakfast for today the park had been due to open at 9. But the hours had been changed and it was now opening at 8am. I didn’t think it was worth worrying about as I knew we would only spend half a day in the park anyway.
We’d made good time and we’re through the tapstiles for rope drop and entering the park at 8am.

It meant we had enough time for one ride before our breakfast so we asked the kids. They both immediately chose Its a Small World!
It definitely isn’t their favourite ride, but they know that Simon finds it annoying and they’d been winding him up about it for weeks! So I had a feeling it would be the one they chose.

Simon as the good dad he is dutifully went along with their choice and was a good sport about it. Back in 2007 the ride broke down when we were on it but the music continued playing, and playing and playing! He’s still slightly traumatised by it now! So I know he was praying it didn’t break down again.

We walked straight onto a boat and immediately set off. The kids enjoyed the ride and laughed lots.
I always marvel at how spotlessly clean all the models are! I mean seriously that’s a massive amount of dusting! :-)
I’d love to know how many people are responsible for it and how long it takes. Am I the only one who has ever wondered that?

So with our tummies starting to rumble we took a lovely stroll around to Crystal Palace and checked in for our breakfast ADR. We waited on the porch for around 10 minutes I think before being called and taken to our table.
We were sat to the left hand side of the restaurant again. About 4 tables away from where we sat on our previous trip. I really love this place. It’s so open and light and welcoming and the staff have always been super helpful and efficient in our experience.

We ordered drinks and then took it in turns to get some food. I also got the kids autograph books out and found the relevant pages for the Winnie the Pooh characters.
We saw Tigger then Eeyore, Winnie and lastly Piglet.

The interaction levels were good. Nothing amazing happened but it was more than a photo and signature, each character interacted with the kids a little bit and showed that they liked their outfits and their autograph pages and gave them lots of cuddles.

The kids were left smiling and very happy after each one and that is all that matters to me.

Breakfast was superb as we had expected and I honestly wish I could have managed to eat more! I love their hot food selection, as does Simon. But I also love their breakfast lasagne! Oh how I want some right now!
Grayson was all about the sausages and fruit and muffins. Miley liked the bacon, waffles and breakfast lasagne.
I love that they keep drinks topped up and we felt very well looked after and very content by the time we left. We finished up at about 9.45, just in time to fit in an extra ride before our Dumbo fastpass.
Jungle Cruise was up first. I know this isn’t to everyone’s taste but I find it amusing and the kids positively love it. But the stand by line can get long and I don’t like it enough to spend ages queuing for it! Today the standby was only 10 minutes which was fine for us.
Cuddles with Daddy whilst we waited.

We all enjoyed the boat ride and I love watching the kids and how they react to everything. They hadn’t Remembered the details from going on this on our last trip so it was a new experience for them again today really. Both of them giggled a lot!

After this we fetched the stroller, popped the kids in and took a nice walk across the park to the Dumbo ride. We stopped at the restrooms on our way so Grayson could use the facilities! If he drinks juice or squash of any kind it just goes straight through him! And he will need to pee many times in the hour or two afterwards! He’d had juice at breakfast and so this was his second toilet stop so far.

Again the kids love the Dumbo ride. Obviously it isn’t exactly thrilling for me or Simon but we love that the kids enjoy it so much and I do like to get up high and have a look at the view around the park.
This was our first FastPass of the day as I refuse to queue for it.

Dumbo was a big hit again as always and both kids came off smiling. Both saying thank you to the cast member as they left.

We had about 20 minutes until our barnstormer FastPass opened, so we went into Big Top Treats.
I wanted to look at Magicbands and we told the kids we could get a drink.
The selection of magicbands was good and we all found ones that we liked. So we bought some here. We had:
Me - Minnie Mouse red spots
Simon - Iron Man
Miley - Marie the Cat
Grayson - Darth Vader
I sat down outside and linked them all to MDE which didn’t take long.
Simon meanwhile took the kids up to buy drinks. He came back with slushes and cakes! Lol. I really do love the slushes from here, but I get such terrible brain freeze. Does anyone else have that problem?
We sat down for a while and enjoyed our very sugary and sweet drinks and snacks whilst talking and people watching.

We never manage to finish the slushes. I really should ask for an extra cup to split one in two for the kids to share! So we popped what was left in the drinks holders on our stroller and then went and did our barnstormer FastPass. It took a few minutes in the FastPass line and we were on.

Me with Miley and Simon with Grayson.
60 seconds later and we were done. I think this could have been a great ride if only it was a bit longer. I know it’s aimed at kids/families. But who wants to spend so long in an uncomfortably hot queue to have such a short ride experience.
I genuinely think it takes longer to walk through the path to the exit than it does to ride the ride!
At the end of the exit path, Grayson insisted on holding the gate open for all the people coming through after us. He does this a lot and it’s very sweet. But the amount of adults who don’t even look at him let alone say thank you is really quite shocking!

We knew we were pretty much done for the day. We’d only planned on staying half the day, it was around 10.50 now and the queues for most things were getting longer.

We walked over to the Splash zone and let the kids go crazy!
Oh my goodness they loved this! Their faces were hilarious.

They both ran around in there for quite some time. It was very hot today and so they relished getting wet.
Miley was literally soaked to the skin!
We rounded them up and made our way out of the park at 12.

The monorail back to the carpark was empty at this time of day so we had a quick journey back to the car.
Now we had a change of clothes for Grayson. He was still a bit hit and miss getting to the toilet on time, so I always had spares. But we didn’t have any for Miley. We’d not planned ahead for the splash zone and I’d underestimated just how absolutely soaking she would be afterwards!
We got Grayson changed and in the car. But with no clothes for Miley we undressed her and then she put my cardigan on and wrapped it around her! It was the best we could do.
She is so skinny, she would have frozen on the drive back to the villa if we’d left her in the wet dress.

So we were staying in the Reserve at Town Center which was down near ChampionsGate. It was a new area to us. The drive back at this time of day was fine and took around 20 minutes.

Once back I got the kids in and made sure they were both dried off properly. And I put some actual clothes on Miley!

We had given them a small bag in which they could bring some toys from home. And so they got that bag out now and went and played together. Both kids have great imaginations and so a new house offers many many opportunities for locations to play which they were excited about!

The plan had been to stop at SuperTarget on the way back from Magic Kingdom, but obviously with Miley soaking wet and without clothes we couldn’t do that. So we now planned on spending some time at the villa and then driving up to Super Target later this afternoon and getting dinner up on the 192 somewhere.

Whilst the kids were playing I unpacked all the parcels that Fairytale Personal Shopper has dropped off for me.
I won’t lie. This was a LOT of fun!
I had parcels from the following places:
Walmart
Amazon.com (x lots!)
Etsy x3
Torrid x2
Disney Store
Gap Factory x3
Carters x2

From Etsy I’d ordered a few holiday tshirts for Grayson and also birthday tshirts for both kids.

Miley’s 6th birthday would be towards the end of our holiday and Grayson would turn 4 around ten days after we got home. So I had ordered a lot of stuff for their birthdays from amazon and Disney. Luckily the really big boxes were for Miley’s birthday so I knew all the packaging would be gone before the journey home.

I love the kids clothes from Gap and Carters and so I had bought both kids a fair amount from both of these. I’d also bought myself some cardigans from Gap and Simon had ordered a load of the chinos that he wears for work from there.
We used the gap factory website which is their clearance website so it’s all super cheap!

I had ordered myself some clothes from Torrid, which is an American plus size store. I love their clothes so I was excited about that.

I knew we didn’t want to spend a lot of time shopping on this trip so the service from Fairytale Personal Shopper worked really well for us.

I packed up all the stuff for the kids birthdays and went and hid it in one of the walk in closets. And I just had to keep my fingers crossed that they wouldn’t find it. (They didn’t!)

At around 2.30 we headed out to super target. The journey there was again about 20 minutes. We all love Super Target, I could spend hours and hours in there looking at everything. Simon likes it as it’s always so quiet and clean and the shelves are always fully stocked. Grayson likes it for the toys and the cakes, and Miley likes it for everything! That girl likes to shop!
We bought some spray sunscreen and some toiletries. Then food for the villa like cereal, crisps, fruit, juice and ice-cream! Does anyone else get super excited about the ice-cream aisles in the American supermarkets?! They just put the UK ones to shame! I love ice cream so I’m literally in my element and I love having a freezer in the villa so we can try different flavours.
We also bought lots of bottled water.
And I bought birthday cards, wrapping paper and decorations for Miley’s birthday. Not forgetting the sellotape.
It all came to just under $200! Eek!
And I knew we’d be back later in the holiday to buy some clothes and toys.

Now by this point it was all too much for Miley. She had been experiencing massive levels of excitement all day long and she now crashed. Big time!
We had a very grumpy girl on our hands who had reached her limit.
I talked to her for a while in the car park and when she had calmed down a little bit we made the drive back to the villa. At this point it started raining and it rained really really hard!

We took the shopping in and I set Miley up on the sofa with an iPad so she could watch a cartoon whilst we sorted stuff out. I unpacked the shopping and Simon used his laptop to order dinner from the Chilli’s at ChampionGate. He then drove over to collect the food and brought it back to the villa for us to eat. We ordered;
Smokehouse burger x2
Pepper chicken x 2 for kids

This was part of the reason a villa works so well for us as a family.

Whilst Simon was out I quickly unpacked both mine and Miley’s clothes and put them all on hangers or in the drawers. And I made a start on unpacking Graysons.

We sat at the dining table and had our food which was all very good. The kids had some cakes from super target for pudding.

Overall we’d had a good first day and it felt so good to be back in Florida.

We took the kids up to bed at 7pm, Grayson was asleep by 7.15. That boy just goes out like a light!
Miley took a little longer, obviously, but she was asleep and snuggled up with her teddies by 7.45
I was exhausted and so went to bed early and was asleep by 9. Simon managed to stay up a bit later.


***thoughts on our first day***
So in 2016 I purposely kept our first full day very low key. No parks, no adr’s. We just did breakfast and then went to Disney Springs and then Super Target. We wanted to give the kids, Miley especially, time to adjust and get settled before we started rushing and fitting more things in.
It worked well for us and we avoided any tantrums and over-tiredness.
but Miley had insisted we try a park on our first day this time. In retrospect it wasn’t the best idea. Miley was still tired from traveling (as we all were) but it meant she struggled to cope with all the excitement and as I said we ended up with fallout at the end of the day.
We also continued to have fallout on the next day as well. Which isn’t nice for any of us.
I think if we’d had an easy first day again then the upset could have been avoided.

[Mel49]

Great start to the holiday and as well as the character photos I love seeing the one's of the kids enjoying running through the water and getting soaked.

Good idea getting shopping done before you even got there and seems like great service. I ordered from Amazon while we were there last year but that's the most I've done.

Belated congratulations on your new arrival and not surprise d you've not had time to write this. While writing this will be time consuming for you it will be great for you and your kids to look back on in years to come.

Look forward to reading more

[berniegroves]

Originally Posted by Mel49

Great start to the holiday and as well as the character photos I love seeing the one's of the kids enjoying running through the water and getting soaked.

Good idea getting shopping done before you even got there and seems like great service. I ordered from Amazon while we were there last year but that's the most I've done.

Belated congratulations on your new arrival and not surprise d you've not had time to write this. While writing this will be time consuming for you it will be great for you and your kids to look back on in years to come.

Look forward to reading more

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The kids really did get soaked! I’ve never seen anything like it!

The Fairytale Personal Shopper is a fab service. We’ll definitely do it again

Thanks so much. It’s been interesting going from two to three kids :-)
Yes I am hoping that they enjoy reading the reports when they are older.

Thanks so much for Reading and commenting :-)

[kadypants]

Congratulations on your new arrival! I'm not surprised your trip report has taken the back burner, you've all got far more important things to do! Newborn cuddles are the best! Hope you're all doing well.

What a lovely first day (minus the little grumpiness at the end... we've all been there! Its usually my hubby lol! )

[summersun]

a great start x

[berniegroves]

Originally Posted by kadypants

Congratulations on your new arrival! I'm not surprised your trip report has taken the back burner, you've all got far more important things to do! Newborn cuddles are the best! Hope you're all doing well.

What a lovely first day (minus the little grumpiness at the end... we've all been there! Its usually my hubby lol! )

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Thank you! Yes we’ve been rather busy. Lol. But I really didn’t want any of us to forget the holiday we had as there were some magical moments.

Lol! Yes we can all be a bit grumpy at times

Originally Posted by summersun

a great start x

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Thanks so much

[Lisa29]

A good first full day, the kids look so happy in all the pictures.x

[berniegroves]

Originally Posted by Lisa29

A good first full day, the kids look so happy in all the pictures.x

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Florida really is our happy place :-)

Thanks for reading x

[Charl_bb]

Sounds similar to how our first day will be! My two are a bit older at 7 and 4 but struggle with long days so there's going to be lots of mornings in parks and afternoons chilling. Looking forward to reading the rest

[berniegroves]

Originally Posted by Charl_bb

Sounds similar to how our first day will be! My two are a bit older at 7 and 4 but struggle with long days so there's going to be lots of mornings in parks and afternoons chilling. Looking forward to reading the rest

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Hi,
I think part days are more enjoyable with small kids, mine anyway, as a Florida Holiday can be exhausting.
It’s nice to relax in the afternoons.

Thanks for reading x