Five Little Ones Take the Adults - Day 2, Part 2, My 'Mickey's Grand Welcome', pre-hols, day 1&day 2

[Lisa29]

Day 2, Part 1 – Animal Kingdom is HERE

The Preparation, Set Up and Grand Reveal

Disclaimer, I have lots of photos!

A bit of background for this, whilst planning for our 2010 trip, I found the Disney Florist website. They do some amazing stuff on here and I found something very similar to this

which I ordered for Madison as a late birthday present. With tax and delivery it cost 60 something dollars, which I didn’t think was too bad. I had a look again for this year and the package above was $103.95 plus tax and shipping which I wasn’t prepared to pay, especially as I would need two. I then got to thinking about this Grand Welcome

Now this is really expensive and having two girls, one welcome wouldn’t be enough as they would each want the Mickey and Minnie, etc. I had also found the creative DISign forum on the other Disney boards and saw on there that a lady (rachandgarry) had done her own version, with some help from a DISigner (jtanddolly), which she took to DLP for her son. I got to thinking that this was a good idea(!) and thought that I would be able to do this a lot cheaper than buying the one above. This was early summer last year.

I mentioned it to Phil and he thought I was mad, Dan thought it was a good idea, as did my Mum. Of course then Mum says ‘you will do this for Sydney and Kori too?’. Well there is no way I would leave them out so agreed. Then thought, hmm, I was going to do 6 boxes each (Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Goofy, Pluto), that is 24 boxes, never mind, I will make it work! Then Bethany got pregnant with Piper so I now had a Grand Welcome for 5 Princesses to put together!

So I accumulated all of these

I didn’t buy this many pairs of shoes, I asked in Clarks every time I was shopping if they had any empty kids shoe boxes going spare!

And bought these for inside the boxes

And all of these for wrapping the boxes

(I over-estimated how much paper I would need so now have lots left over! )

I bought ribbon and card and bows, made the gift tags and then ended up with this

]
Yes, I know, I am completely bonkers!

During the 18 months or so leading up to the holiday, I bought loads of little bits to go in the boxes. Things like crayons, notebooks, loads from the Disney Store including the little flip phones, magnets, purses, little Princess dolls and playing cards, small toys, teddies, stickers and a ridiculous amount more! Almost everything I bought was in the sale or was fairly inexpensive.

It was a bit harder getting stuff for Kori and Piper as they were younger but we managed to get enough for them in the end.

Mum bought some of the stuff too.

A couple of months before we went, I started wrapping all the boxes over a period of a few weeks, doing a few each night. I had decided on five boxes for each of the girls so made up:

Five of each of these

Three of these

And two of these

And this is what I ended up with

I know, there are a lot of boxes there! I got them down to this

by putting the smaller boxes in the bigger ones. These were then put away so the girls couldn’t see them until it was time to start packing.

I had five gift bags full of all the stuff for the girls, one each, but I forgot to take pictures of these before I packed everything. I blame Phil for this, as I wanted to get everything packed quickly so he couldn’t see exactly how much stuff there was!

Everything I had took up a whole case, plus a few of the boxes went into one of the other cases.

Continued in next post.

[Lisa29]

Continued from previous post

Fast forward to our arrival day and while Phil, Dan and Marie were helping the others unpack their car when they arrived, and the girls were in bed asleep, I was unpacking all the boxes and presents.

Phil, Dan and Marie came back and helped. We had tissue paper to put in the boxes, which was really difficult to cut without scissors, then we put all the gifts in the boxes, stacked them up in a pile for each of the girls and hid them behind the TV in the master bedroom so that Madison and Kaley wouldn’t find them in the morning.

The next morning we were up early as normal. We got dressed and gave the girls some cereal. Dan and Marie took Madison and Kaley to the other villa while Phil and I got out all the boxes and started setting up. Dan and Marie came back to help.

Back home, I had also bought some packs of bunting and then printed out letters to stick on them spelling out the girls’ names. We put these up too.

It didn’t take the four of us long to sort this and before long, we were ready and had this set up:

They each had a pile of boxes and a gift bag with a tag with their name, set up in different parts of the living room.

This is nowhere near as detailed or as good as the one that rachandgarry did but I thought they were a bit young for the footprints, Donald feathers, Tink shadow, etc.

We then all left to go to Animal Kingdom. Link to Day 2, Part 1 – Animal Kingdom is HERE.

We had previously had lots of discussions about how to do this and finally decided about a week before the holiday to set it up this way, go to Animal Kingdom for the morning and then all come back together.

Continued in next post

[Lisa29]

Continued from previous post

We left Animal Kingdom at 1.30pm and went back to Saratoga Springs. Everyone went to the second villa whilst Phil and I went back to our villa to check nothing had fallen down. It was fine so we called the other room and they all came to us.

The girls were excited coming in the door and even more excited when they saw the piles of presents.

They loved opening all the boxes and showing us everything they had.

Continued in next post

[Lisa29]

Continued from previous post

More pictures

Don't these two look impressed?!

Dad looks like he likes it!

I really enjoyed doing this. It took a lot of time and a fair bit of money but it was completely worth it. The girls loved it and my two enjoyed playing with their gifts and the boxes for the rest of the holiday. And it was still lots cheaper than the Disney Florist version!

Thank you to anyone who reads and lets me indulge and write about my crazy idea!

Day 2 part 3 – Downtown Disney is HERE

[howardfamily]

Hey,


Loving your trippie so far! All the kids are very cute!


I just wanted to say I really love the way you decorated the boxes to fit the characters and their personalities, it was awesome.


Megan x

[Milner]

What lovely photos greet idea.

[bardo76]

Wow what a great idea, I love it . Can I be cheeky and ask where did you get the name tags for the boxes from, looks like they all really enjoyed that. The look on your dads face say's it all.

[B&I]

Wow, what a lovely idea, you put so much thought and effort into it all, it looks like Christmas morning! The girls look so pleased.

[WileyCoyote]

What a fabulous welcome , so much thought and effort, it must have taken you an age to get that all ready, so lovely to see the smiley faces, super treat. Well done you

[moosha]

Wow, Lisa - what lucky girls The grand welcome looks amazing, the boxes look great

The girls look so happy with it all, what a lovely thing to have done