Dining with the Princesses

Everyone who goes to Disney has a dream or wish that they would like to eat in Cinderella's Castle and dine with the princesses.  It is a fun magical experience, but also not a cheap one.  If you are on the dining plan it requires 2 of your table service credits.  The first time we ate at Cinderella's Royal Table was on our first trip to WDW and it was a truly magical experience and we enjoyed every minute of it.  We did not use our table service credits- we did a breakfast and paid out of pocket (2 adults and 1 child our youngest was only 7 months old) and we paid about $95.  I know that is an expensive breakfast, but keep in mind you are paying for the experience and we calculated that paying for it made more sense than giving up 2 table service credits each.  We have dined here several other times, but have also tried the Princess Storybook Breakfast at Akershus in Norway at Epcot and have found we enjoy the food here better and the Princess interaction is the same (the one downside is Cinderella may or may not be here).  The breakfast at Akershus is only one table service credit which is one reason we tried it.  You get a free photo package with both meals at Cinderella's Royal Table it is always with Cinderella and Akershus it seems to usually be Belle but I have also heard that sometimes it is Princess Aurora.  Both of these restaraunts also do lunch and dinner with the princesses if you are not interested in breakfast.  We prefer to do breakfast it just seems to fit with our schedule better.  The girls get dressesed in the princess attire we head to breakfast then when they get tired of wearing the dresses we go and change into the change of clothes I brought them and hang the dresses in a bag on our stroller.

My girls with Cinderella at Cinderella's Royal Table

My girls with Belle at the Princess Storybook breakfast at Akershus

the photos above are the pictures that were taken by the Disney Photopass photographer and included with the price of our meal


they take the photo on your way to your table and then towards the end of the meal they bring your photo package to you at your table you will receive a 6x8 and 4 4x6 of the photo that Disney decides looked the best

if you are still trying to decide if you want to do this experience or which restaurant to choose click here to read another bloggers review of their experience at Cinderella's Royal Table

Flower and Garden Festival

Just wanted to let everyone know that Epcot's annual Flower and Garden Festival kicked off this past week and will run until May 16th.  This is a really fun time to visit Epcot.  Our family has been twice during the flower and Garden festival and my 2 girls have loved it.  It is so much fun just to stroll around and see all the different topiaries of Disney Characters.  Each year they have a different theme and several different topiaries (I have noticed that some are also the same from year to year however still fun to see again!)  There also several very innovative playgrounds set up around the park, a butterfly garden and last year they added a Pixie Hollow tinker bell garden which I have heard has been expanded this year. We would be going again but they have changed to dates this year to where the festival has started earlier so it will end earlier and there is just not a good way to go with out my daughter missing school.

If you are interested in more details about this years Flower and Garden Festival be sure to go and check out Allears and right on the main page you will find some great links to all sorts of information and pictures.

Cupcakes- Mickey birthday party

As you probablly know if you read this blog much that we are pretty immersed in Disney. We travel to WDW a couple times a year, we love Disney movies, pretty much anything Disney we like. My 4 year old wanted a Valentine Mickey birthday party this year (she was born on Valentine's day). These are the cupcakes I came up with this year! I thought that they turned out pretty cute so I wanted to share them. The Mickey ears I made out of dark chocolate by putting wax paper over a template I had printed from a disney font I use and then used a piping bag adn piped the chocolate onto to wax paper and put in the fridge to harden. The hearts are sugar cookies with a royal icing. I make some shape of these cookies every year for my daughters birthday parties it is a birthday tradition at our house. The polka dots are made from the same icing as on the sugar cookie they were piped onto wax paper and I let them harden for 2 days.


Here is a picture of one of the cupcakes I made for her birthday last year.  We did a mickey only theme last year so I did not have the pink incorporated.  This would be a good one to make if you had a little boy who wanted a Mickey Mouse party.  The star is a sugar cookie the same as the heart on the cupcake from this year except I used a mini cookie cutter and the Mickey ears on this on I used a Mickey craft punch and glued a toothpick between to punch out Mickey ears.  The polka dots are the royal icing again as on the sugar cookie This cupcake I would say is a bit simpler just because the Mickey ears are much less time intensive and the cookies are smaller so not as much icing to be done.

I think both cupcakes turned out very cute and were definitely a hit at the parties.  However if I had to choose a favorite it would be the valentine mickey one I really love how the heart cookie turned out and the chocolate mickey was just a fun extra touch.  My Daughter who is turning 7 in the spring has already asked to have a Minnie Mouse party so I have begun brainstorming her cupcakes and I am thinking red icing with white polka dots just like Minnie's dress.  I am excited about them I will definitely post pictures up here in April after the party!


Also if you want recipes for any of the parts just leave a comment and I will get them to you

Disney Deals

I have not done extensive research on the current deals but while I was looking through an e-mail from mouse savers it looks as if there are some deals out there for some date through out the summer.  If you are interested you should go check out mousesavers.com I will say this site is sometimes hard to navigate and figure out I am hoping to have time in the next day or two to look more closely at the deals and booking codes and get a post up here for you.

Just wanted to get the info as quickly as possible to you in case you did not want to wait on me......

Disney Birthday

There is nothing like having a birthday at Disney.  I spent my 30th birthday at Disney this past October and had a lot of fun.  It was also the first time my Husband and I had done Disney World together with out our kids.  I will touch on that aspect another day.  You will feel so extra special when you walk around the Disney parks and hear birthday wishes all day long.  Cupcakes, candles and singing at your dinners.

 I really enjoyed this trip, but did not realize I could go on a more exciting birthday trip to Disney until we took my youngest daughter who was turning 4 on a Disney Birthday trip.  She loved it!  She kept thanking us over and over for bring her to have a family birthday at Disney World (which is one of her very favorite places).  She loved wearing her birthday pin with her name on it and hearing everyone wish her happy birthday she was always surprised when they would say her name- it was so cute.

  We decided not to go on her actual birthday we took her the weekend before- we wanted the cheaper prices and less crowds.  Her birthday is on Valentines day which is Presidents Day weekend (one of the worse weekends to go to WDW- they say almost as bad as Christmas and New Years Day)  When making our dining reservations I treated the weekend as if the Sunday we were there was her birthday and booked a Princess Breakfast and dinner at Chef Mickey's (this would be my number one tip if planning a birthday at Disney especially for kids book Character meals for their birthday)  At the breakfast Mackenzie received a birthday card signed by all the princesses.  Then that night at dinner Mickey came out and helped "sing" a birthday song and was right there next to her after she blew out her candle.  Such a magical birthday experience.

I definitely recommend having a Disney birthday sometime!

Disney Outlet Deal 20% OFF

They are already doing it again - here is a code for an additional 20% off all Disney outlet items- BARGAIN20
is the discount code be sure to go check it out and see what you can find- I did notice that things are pretty picked over since they just did a sale in past week or so, but you never know what you might find at a good price you just have to take the time to dig.  The e-mail I received did say they have added some new items-  Good Luck and happy shopping!

deal has expired

Disney Outlet Deal

DISNEY DEAL ALERT

Kids T-shirts and sweat shirts starting at $2.99 and there are also great deals on adult T- shirts- they have a full size run of both Goofy and Donald t-shirts and they are only $4.99 and then the 20% off a great way to get in the Disney spirit for your trip is to where some Disney T-shirts

This deal has expired- will keep you posted about new deals

Should you go to Disney for vacation?

This is a question you really can only answer for yourself but the biggest thing to consider when deciding if Disney World is a good vacation for you is "What kind of vacation are you wanting?"  If you want relaxing, hanging out at the pool then do not do Disney you will probablly end up dissapointed.  If you want excitement and adventure and to be busy the whole time then YES go to Disney World.  Many people spend a lot of money to go to Disney World and only spend a few hours in the park a day and then go back to the hotel and hang out these are the people who usually get back home from vacation and say Disney is way to expensive.  I agree with them sort of if you are really spending most of the trip sleeping in and laying out by the pool go somewhere cheaper there is no reason you need to be at Disney World to do that.  If you go to Disney World with a plan of attack and a schedule to maximize all the time you will be there and see everything you want to see you will not feel like you wasted your money.  In the coming weeks I will address how my husband and I create our schedule for our trips to WDW. So if you are thinking about a trip WDW then ask yourself the most important question then go from there......and if you decide Yes WDW is where we want to go then I hope we can offer some great ideas fro you to use on your trip

Dumbo

This morning I have been going through pictures of my Family's Disney trips from the past 4 years and one ride I keep seeing a lot of is Dumbo. So I thought I would blog about Dumbo today. The Dumbo ride is a great classic Disney ride and in fact the one you will probably wait the longest to ride in all of Fantasyland. It does not matter the time of day or the time of year you will probably wait at least 30 minutes to get on this ride. I am not saying there is not the rare occasions where "the stars are aligned" and everything is timed perfectly and you get on in 10 minutes, but this is rare.

Now the exciting news about Dumbo- this Disney Classic ride will be relocated and expanded as part of Disney World's Fantasyland expansion. Here is some concept art of the new ride

The key changes will be that there will be two Dumbo rides going at once and they will be adding fun activities to the waiting areas. The Fantasyland expansion project is due to break ground sometime in early 2010!

Hopefully once all is complete and newness wears off this will make the wait times for Dumbo not so ridiculous and if they are long you will have some games etc to make the time go by quickly. However Dumbo will always be a ride you have to go on at least once while at Disney no matter what the wait!

My Tips for Dumbo:

-If you are doing an extra magic evening hours and plan on staying awhile do Dumbo around 11:45 or so.

-If you do not have extra magic hours then the best bet is going to be to get to the park at opening go straight to Dumbo no stopping for photo pass pictures in front of the castle no Main Street Bakery breakfast just get in line for Dumbo!

-For good pictures if you have a family of four of larger get Dumbo's next to each other and take pictures of each other during the ride (the grown-ups might have to grab the controls a time or two the get the shot lined up)

-Also don't forget you can make use of the Dumbo outside the ride for photos as well

- One more tip- if your child loves the Dumbo ride and you do not want to wait over and over maybe try the Triceratops spin at Animal Kingdom or Magic Carpets of Aladdin at Magic Kingdom in Adventureland both these rides are very similar to Dumbo but usually have much shorter wait times

Money Saving tip #2- for those with little Princesses

The bibiddi boppidi boutique is very expensive in fact I have never taken my girls, but they have not gone with out all the glitz and glamor of going. I have only ever paid full price for their princess dresses and those I bought at the Disney Outlet so that may not even really count as full price. One of my favorite things is surprising the girls the night before or morning of our princess breakfast with a new Princess Costume. We buy them when they are on sale like right now go check out these deals. The dresses at Disney usually will run you at least $80 and that is just the dress not the biddidi boppidi boutique trip. I like the Disney Store dress better then the Disney Parks dresses usually.

So you are thinking "what about the hair part of bibbidi boppidi boutique and all the glitter?"- and my answer is a can of Spray glitter which is about $2 or you can even purchase it right after Halloween and get it even cheaper. For my older daughter with long hair i do French braids and then spray the glitter all over her. With my 31/2 year old we just put her hair up in a clip and pray glitter. You really can do whatever hairstyles you would like and then just go crazy with the glitter.

Here is a photo of my 6 year old after my version of a bippidi boppidi make over:

we even have people ask her if she has been to the boutique during the day as she is walking around all dressed up.

If you want the experience the closest money saving option I can offer is to take your children to the main street barber shop (located near the Fire Hall) and get them to put some "pixie dust" in there hair. I do not know and exact price of this we went this past trip and my husband had his beard trimmed and both my daughters received "pixie dust" and we paid less than $15 including the tip we left them

here are my 2 girls after our trip to the Barber Shop-

Saving money Tip #1- T-Shirt Souvenirs

My girls love to have Disney souvenirs but if you get them all at the parks they are very expensive. One thing I do is watch the Disney Store for deals on T-shirts either at the store or online. I have even found that I usually can get them for $5 or less. I am signed up to receive their e-mails about when there are sales going on and receive coupons sometimes for additional percentage off the sale price- I will try to post on here when there is a good deal in case you do not want to fill your e-mail boxes up with all the junk.

The wall-E shirts my girls are wearing here I bought for $3.99 each and then one morning on our trip we surprised the girls with them.

I got the 2 wall-e shirts and a Donald Duck T-shirt for my husband and spent less than $20 after tax and shipping not a bad deal at all.

patience

patience is key- if you want to get a good deal on a trip to Disney you need to be flexible about when you are going and then just be patient and wait for a deal. If you play your cards right and are flexible on your travel dates you can almost always save at least 30% off your Disney vacation. Here is the latest deal and here is a link to a more in depth view of the deal from allears.net

I am back

Ok- I just made an early new years resolution for myself I am going to attempt to keep up with this blog. I love Disney and I am always thinking about it at some point in my day so why not share a quick story or tip or piece of planning info each day. My goal when I started this blog is to help other families enjoy their vacations to Disney as much as my family enjoys ours which is a lot! As people read my posts I would love for them to comment any questions they have and if I have any answers I will most defiantly share them with you. Also if there are any topics you are especially curious about please let me know those too because I can certainly do a post about specific questions people have. Looking forward to a year filled with Disney information

Schedule Underway

So this past weekend my husband and sat down and began planning out our tentative schedule for the big October Disney Trip. We are figuring out mostly what parks we will go to when so we can decide when to eat at the restaurants we want to go to so that it makes sense with our schedule. The first thing we usually do is go through the restaurants and decide where we want to eat and then from there we plug them into the schedule where they make sense. It is good to have a variety of place like try not to pick all Epcot restaurants and when you are looking at resort restaurants think about how long it could take to get to that restaurant and if you think you want to take that much time out of your day for dinner. We usually stick to resorts on the monorail if we are going to a resort restaurant. That is just a little bit of the process- I will talk more about this when we finish our scedule

Hours

Finally the hours are up for our October trip- well most of the hours. I checked on July 1st nothing. Then I checked back on July 2nd and the hours for Magic Kingdom and Hollywood studios were up, but nothing for Animal Kingdom or Epcot I thought it was strange. I went back again to Disney's site on July 3rd and they had posted the rest of the hours for our trip, but not all of the extra magic hour days and nothing was listed for the World Showcase part of Epcot. Today when I looked everything is up except World Showcase hours. The next step now in our planning is to plug the hours into our Excell planning worksheet and decide what our general schedule will be what parks we want to go to when and then plug our dining into that so when we hit the 90 day mark we can make our dining reservations. I know I have mentioned earlier in the blog that Disney has made it so you can book dining reservations online which we are looking forward to trying out. I will let you know when we make our general schedule I think our 90 day mark to do our dining is July 17th or so.

The waiting game

We are anxiously awaiting Disney to put up the hours for October so that we can begin making our schedule for our trip. We can book our dining in Mid-July so we want to figure out where we will be which days so that we know what days we want to eat where because as soon as you can book your dining you want to book so that you are able to get all the restaurants you want. Certain restaurants are harder to get into so we always book those first. The two hardest that we like to eat at are Cinderella's Royal Table (also known as CRT) and Le Cellier which is in Canada in the Epcot World Showcase.

One thing we are excited about is that Disney just launched online Dining reservation making on their site. We will definitely be trying this out. It looks like it might be a little time consuming, but when you do it on the phone it also takes awhile. I will be sure to write about the experience. I will say I am a little nervous about how the new system is going to affect the availability of reservations- we will just have to wait and see!

All Ears....

This morning I have spent just purusing the all ears site to just see what all will be going on while we are at Disney in October and just seeing if there is anything else we do not know that might help us in our vacation planning. The biggest thing going on that we have never experienced is the Epcot Food and Wine festival. We are looking forward to this event. The past two vacations we have taken to Disney World the Epcot Flower and Garden Festival has been going on and we have really enjoyed that. I do not even think we scrapped the surface of what there is to do during the festival, but it has still been fun. We have never done Flower Power Concert which goes on during the flower and Garden festival. There are also concerts during the wine festival and I am thinking that we might try to go to one this time. There is so much to do at Disney that you will never be able to do it all in one trip. Although if you plan it right you can do a lot. We call Disney our Adventure Vacation because we stay so busy while we are there. If you want a nice peaceful relaxing vacation Disney is just not that- I think instead you will feel very frustrated at the amount of money you paid if you sleep in late and spend a majority of your time at your hotel or pool.

We go to the beach to relax and we go to Disney to Have FUN!

Have a Magical Day!

Something my Husband and I have always looked forward to when talking to the Disney Travel Company people was at the end of the conversation as they were about to hang up they would say "Have a Magical day!"  Over the past year or two they have started to not say it every time and we have missed it.  While changing our reservation for our past trip we had a Cast member named Blair who went above and beyond what we expected from her.  She was extremely helpful with everything.  She did her best to find an answer to our questions.  She even told us to have a magical day as we wee getting off.  I tell this story because after we got off the phone with her my husband decided to send Disney an e-mail telling her how helpful Blair was and that he hoped she would get some recognition for her hard work.  When we got back from our trip there was a message from Disney saying that they appreciated the time we took to tell them about Blair and her hard work, and that she would be receiving recognition for a job well done.  

The Disney Cast members are almost always very helpful.  It means a lot when you get one who really and truly goes above and beyond to make your trip more magical!

Food, Parties and More

I have spent a little time this afternoon trying to get what info I can about things that are going on while we are at Disney that come into play with our scheduling.  I have looked up the Not-so-scary Halloween party dates and there is also a Tower of Terror night time 13k and 5k race going on October 24th the Saturday after we plan to leave.  The Food and Wine Festival will also be going on at Epcot while we are on our trip.  We have never been to it before.  We will probably look into checking it out.  I will need to look into it further a different day.

I have also been looking at Menus and trying to decide where we want to eat on this trip to Disney.  This is definitely one of the fun parts of the vacation planning.  We have always done the Disney Dining Plan when we go.  Sometimes we have been able to get it free and other times we just pay for it.  One thing to note be prepared for lots of food when you do the dining plan.  We like to at least try a new restaurant every trip we take to WDW.  This past time we tried several new restaurants and found some new favorites.  Garden Grill is a new one we tried that we will definitely be going back to.  I have been looking for a new character breakfast for our trip in October.  We usually do Chef Mickey's but we just wanted to try something different on our upcoming trip.  The breakfasts I am looking at right now are Cape May Cafe and the O'hana breakfast.  We also want to try a different dinner- we are considering Coral Reef, The Wave and maybe Kouzzina (Cat Cora's new restaurant) we will just have to wait and see if it is open when we go they have not released a opening date for it yet.  I will be sure to let everyone know what our final dining choices end up being.

Planning....

We have the trip booked now the next step is we like to get the park hours so we can start figuring out when we want to schedule our dining reservations.  We used to be able to do all this as soon as our trip was booked but Disney has changed some things around.  First of all you used to could book your dining 180 day out and now it is just 90 days which for this trip is better since we booked it closer to the actual trip dates as we have in the past it will mean we can still get the reservations we want.  Also the park Hours are not available as soon as they used to be.  I just check this afternoon hoping that I would be able to start filling in our schedule for October, but they are not posted yet :( I will just have to keep checking back periodically.  They should be available before the 9o day mark when I can book our dining.  My husband and I just get anxious about making our schedule after we have trip booked it is just a fun part of the whole trip experience we like to do to together.