Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

Today is a beautiful Fall day! We went apple picking and got 2 bushels of yummy apples.

More pictures here.

Today is Gillian’s 5th birthday. We’ve already opened presents, had breakfast, and are playing outside on this beautiful Fall morning. Later today is Gillian’s party. I’ve started a set on Flickr for Gillian’s 5th Birthday, I’ll add more pictures later.

Yesterday I took the girls to Midway Park. We spent about five hours riding rides (well, the girls rode the rides, I went on the carousel once and it took me a few minutes to stop being dizzy) and having a blast! The unlimited ride pass for each of the girls is definately the way to go, since then they could just keep riding until they got hungry. Then we had lunch, played a bit in the arcade and then went back to riding. We all had a lot of fun!

Then after we got home, Karen joined us and we went down to Farm Festival for a bit. We got some yummy food and walked around. It seemed smaller this year, I wonder if the economy had anything to do with that. But we had fun for the bit we were there.

Today we moved Erin upstairs into her big-girl bed. It is very quiet, so I think she went to sleep. We’ll see how she does when she wakes up in a different room and a different bed.

Karen is away at a conference (check her blog for updates on that) and I took yesterday and today off to watch the girls. Today we went to the Erie zoo. We had a lot of fun, I uploaded pictures/video to a set on my Flickr.

A lot of the animals were sleepy or inactive, but the kangaroos were the most active I’ve ever seen them. Three of them crossed the path in front of us. It was pretty cool to see them move.

The orangutan played “peek-a-boo” with Bella and Gilli. The girls thought that was fun!

Here’s a video of the girls at the chime-sidewalk:

This is how I felt at the end of the day:

I just uploaded another batch of Easter pictures. You can see the whole set here.

Tonight we dyed Easter eggs. The girls had a lot of fun as always. I started a set for Easter 2009, so look for more photos after tomorrow.

Yesterday we got our puppy, a 3 year old Beagle/Labrador mix. Bella named her Britta after Kirsten’s baby sister in the American Girl stories, as opposed to the water filters.

Britta is a very sweet dog and has instantly fit in with our family.

On Friday it was time to head out to Karen’s grandparents. We had breakfast at the hotel and then headed out. Some things we learned from this trip:

If at all possible, stay at one of the park hotels. We stayed in the All Star Music, which had pools, food, and a playground right there. The bus service was great, no need to drive and park. Even still, you have to remember that taking the bus at best will take 20 minutes and our longest trip, including wait time, was about 45 minutes. This adds up.

If you are going to see the fireworks in the Magic Kingdom try to be closer to the front of the park (by the exit). We were in the very back of the park and it took us a very long time to get out of the park. Plus we had to wait for a second bus since the first one filled up. This made for a very long night.

If you have little ones it is totally worth renting a stroller if you didn’t bring one (or like us wanted one for the older kids). We would never have gotten as much in on Wednesday if we didn’t have the double stroller in addition to the single we brought with us.

If at all possible plan a day in the middle of the trip to not do any parks. Chill out at the pool and playground or something. That way you are not exhausted on the last days.

Don’t have a weekend in the trip, or maybe use Saturday as the chill day. We arrived on Monday and left on Friday. The parks and hotel (pool, food, etc) were pretty empty until Thursday. Then it took longer to do everything. Next time I think arriving on a Saturday or Sunday and leaving on a Friday might be best with a day ‘off’ on Tuesday or Wednesday. The only possible downfall is there may be more programming over the weekend.

Get a meal plan. Food is expensive, but with the meal plan it is already prepaid and one less thing to worry about. We got the Quick Service Dining Plan, which worked great for our family. We each, except for Erin, got 2 quick-service meals and 2 snacks a day. We managed to use them all except for one meal. We also each got a refillable mug to use at the hotel cafeteria. This was very handy.The food at the hotel cafeteria was very good and it was very convenient to be able to grab food before going to and after getting back from the parks. The servings were big enough that Erin had plenty to eat without us going over our allotment. All of the meals came with so much food, it was really great.

This was taken in the main lobby of the hotel right before we left:

On Thursday we decided that we would take it easy in the morning. We lounged about for a while and then went to the playground that was part of the hotel (you could see it from the walkway outside of our room). The girls had a blast!

After lunch we decided to head over to Hollywood Studios. This was the loudest park we went to. There was a parade going on, but even still it was so loud I couldn’t hear myself think. We snuck around the parade and snapped a picture of the girls with a hedge Mickey:

After that we went to the Voyage of the Little Mermaid, which was a live action retelling of the Little Mermaid movie. The girls loved it!

Then we went on to Toy Story Mania, which was really fun! It was funny though, on the way out the wait time had gone up to 80 minutes, and someone asked how long the ride was and the attendant said about 8 minutes. The person could not believe they had to wait 10 times longer than the length of the ride!

We didn’t wait that long, but after those two rides and the fact that we went late in the day things were already starting to wind down. We were going to to the Studio Backlot Tour, but that was closed. So we went to the Honey I Shrunk The Kids place but that was closed. So we headed over to Star Tours. Karen and Erin sat that one out, so I took Gilli and Bella. The girls had so much fun that we rode again. They probably could have rode that all night, but we figured twice was enough. This was right before the second ride:

Then we realized we missed the last show of the Indiana Jones show, and we were pretty tired anyway, so we headed back to the hotel. Towards the end of the week we just didn’t have the energy that we had at the start, but we still had a lot of fun.

On Wednesday we decided to rent a double stroller and spend the whole day at the Magic Kingdom. We had Erin’s single stroller, but we figured with a full day ahead of us the double stroller for Bella and Gilli would work well; which it did.

Bella and Gilli were collecting autographs and meeting characters as the mood struck them. Bella decided she wanted to meet Pinocchio, but Gilli decided to wait with Karen and Erin.

Meeting Pinocchio

We lucked out, as we got to Main Street in the Magic Kingdom a parade was starting, so we parked at the curb and watched.

Interestingly this was the only time we saw Mickey

Since we went right to TomorrowLand on day one we took a left to AdventureLand and started at the Swiss Family Treehouse. I took these pictures of Bella and Gilli as Erin was getting out of the stroller.

After the Treehouse we went to The Magic Carpets of Alladin and then Bella and Gilli got to meet Princess Jasmine and Alladin.

Then we walked on to the Pirates of the Carribean. We skipped the Capt. Jack Sparrow show that was going on and took advantage of the minimal wait to get on the ride. Gilli was terrified of the ride and the dark, but Bella loved it. Since there was no line Bella and I rode one more time. Since I respected the “no flash photography” rule (unlike some other people on the boat) I didn’t get any good pictures inside the ride.

After that we went to FrontierLand. Bella and Karen were going to ride Splash Mountain but the wait was very lengthy so instead we went on the Walt Disney World Railroad, which took us on a relaxing ride around the park. If we didn’t have the strollers parked in FrontierLand we might have considered getting off at another part of the park, but it was a nice ride and a chance to rest our legs.

After a ridiculous search for a restroom we found Peter Pan, so Bella and Gilli got to meet him.

Since we were in FrontierLand we had to stop and see the Country Bear Jamboree. I had never seen it before, but after seeing the movie I can understand why the girls were not that excited and Bella said “that’s not the Country Bears!”

After that we almost got caught watching another parade but decided to skip it when the opportunity presented itself. We stopped for a snack as the day began to take its toll on us. We decided to split up since the next ride we were going on was the Haunted Mansion and Erin wouldn’t be able to ride that. I took Bella and Gilli (I was surprised she wanted to go) to The Haunted Mansion while Karen took Erin to Ariel’s Grotto.

Both Bella and Gilli were scared at The Haunted Mansion, so we skipped riding that again and trekked over to meet up with Karen and Erin. We decided that we’d let the girls meet Ariel and then go back to the hotel. Unfortunately we did not anticipate the almost hour long wait in the increasingly hot sun being forced to listen to three songs from The Little Mermaid over and over again in a perpetual loop. That is when my ears got painfully sunburned and Erin kicked the camera switching the settings which I did not notice until later, resulting in the blurry picture below.

Erin almost met Ariel, but then decided against it.