Spring 2013 Disney World Trip Report - Intro & Day 1

Ok, drumroll please…

It’s time for our Spring 2013 Walt Disney World Trip Report!

It’s about time, right?! Well, it’s amazing how much of a monumental task it is to edit photos, create videos, try to remember and organize everything (including my thoughts - that’s a lost cause!) in order to present it in an entertaining format. And I don’t even edit the photos! That’s Brett’s job, thankfully. But hey, that’s blogging…and I love it.

I will start by saying that I have mixed feelings about this trip. Don’t get me wrong…we had a ton of fun and I enjoyed every second watching Trent in Disney World. It was a trip we’ve been waiting to take for years. Before we had Trent, we couldn’t wait to take our kids there. But that’s the thing…we had waited so long to take a first trip with our child and now it’s done and in the past. There will never be another “Trent’s First Disney World Trip.” Ever.

It kinda makes me sad.

Sure, there are still PLENTY of things to do at Disney World that will be firsts for him (and us), as well as plenty of trips like cruises, road-trips and more, that we will hopefully take. Heck, we already went on another trip in June and we’ve already started mentally planning a trip in the fall, so it’s not like we won’t be back all.the.time. But just like many milestones of a child growing up, once it happens, that’s it and onto the next one. I guess that’s why they say they grow up too fast. They really do.

Another thing about this trip I have mixed emotions about deals with “capturing the moment” versus “living in the moment”. I plan on going into my thoughts on this in general in another post, but for now, let me just say that we had a lot of “must-do” photos and video that kind of overwhelmed the trip. We had all these plans to do certain things, but our plans slowly went downhill from the moment we stepped on Disney property. That Pre-Trip report? Yeah, about 90% of it didn’t happen in that order. Since we rearranged things, we started just winging it and by Wednesday, I realized I had hardly taken any videos. We ended up not going to Magic Kingdom until Thursday, so perhaps in the back of my mind, I kept “waiting” to do videos, when in fact I had been missing out.

On the other hand, once I started videotaping stuff, I felt like I wasn’t in the moment or that I was doing things just for the camera. But then there were times that I wish I had recorded, like him watching Wishes! for the first time. And when it came to photos, there were plenty on our list that we knew we wanted Brett to take, but we started to run out of time. There was one time we wanted to leave the park, but we still had a few photos to take with Trent knowing it was our last day at Magic Kingdom, but he was taking a nap. I actually had to wake him up and I felt bad.

Next time, we won’t put so many “must-take” photos on our to-do list and instead just capture things as we feel we want to.

This trip report will be broken up into days. So make sure you check back in to follow along (or like us on Facebook - I’ll post new updates there).

 

Day -1: Saturday

The day before our trip is Day minus 1…just a quick note about getting ready…

For the first time in as long as I can remember, we gave ourselves a day to prepare for our trip, instead of going the very next day after working. Well, I gave myself a day to prepare…Brett had a wedding to shoot for most of the day, so it was me and Trent holding down the fort.

And boy was he a needy little fella all day. I thought I never had enough time to prepare for trips before? HA! I had to pack and clean with him in my left arm for half the day…I’m surprised that arm doesn’t look like one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s arms - Mr. Olympia style. Then, he wouldn’t take his naps without me being there, either. I guess it was nice the first time I got to nap with him ;) I was exhausted by the end of the day.

It’s like they know you have stuff to do, so they turn into this…

I always find it so funny how I clean the house before leaving on a trip…I don’t even get to enjoy it!

After a day of preparing, it was also nice to know we weren’t waking up at 4 in the morning like we usually do, so it meant that we might get at least a few hours of sleep. {Ha! Yeah, right!}

 

Day 1: Sunday

Like I just mentioned, it was nice to NOT be leaving at 3-4 in the morning to make it for rope-drop on the first day. Normally, we don’t see the point in paying for a hotel for a night if we won’t be there until late at night after work, so we tend to just leave really early on our first day.

This time, since we had planned on Trent’s first ever day at Disney World to be at Magic Kingdom on Monday, we left Sunday for travel, IKEA, checking in and dinner…a relaxing “get settled in” type of day.

I woke up around 7:30 to get ready and finish some of the last packing items that I didn’t get to do the night before. Then, Brett and Trent woke up shortly after. We wanted to leave by 9am, but in typical Svenson fashion, we left an hour later at 10. Adding getting Trent ready and feeding him to the mix, I knew we weren’t going to leave on time. When we say we want to leave at a particular time, we should just go ahead and add an hour to it from the get-go.

We hit up the drive-thru at McDonald’s (darn you Chick-Fil-A for being closed on Sundays!) for breakfast on the go. We purchased a season’s worth of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse to play on the iPad for Trent. We set up the iPad right in front of him and he watched about 2-3 episodes before falling asleep. Our road-trip was going great so far!

He slept about an hour, woke up and played with some toys for a little bit and when he started getting antsy, we stopped at the next exit and ate lunch at Wendy’s. Wendy’s is so disappointing to eat knowing that you’re about to eat a week’s worth of awesome Disney food, but it let us get out of the car and stretch for a bit. At this point, we were about an hour away from IKEA, so after we finished eating, we were on our way!

Right as we were pulling up to IKEA, it started to rain, which makes for a less than enthusiastic entrance. But oh well, just another reason to stay inside IKEA longer. Apparently, Trent made himself at home in almost every room!

He watched some TV.

He played with some toys.

He got comfy on the couch.

He rode a rocking moose.

He redecorated.

He didn’t want to sleep.

He waited for some food…

More TV.

Still not sleeping.

“Hey, I have this at home!”

He read a story.

He pretended he lived in a dorm.

He reminisced about his newborn-being-washed-in-the-sink days.

Still not sleeping…

It started to get late after being there a couple of hours and since I had to hold Trent by the time we got downstairs, I was ready to go…it could have also been because Brett was in “Throw everything I see into the cart” mode. The man is obsessed with IKEA. It’s best to just keep walking and hope he keeps up.

It was still raining when we left, so packing up the car was super fun.

We had dinner reservations at Cape May Cafe within the next 30 minutes, but we still wanted to check in to our hotel. The problem? Torrential downpouring. We live in Florida, so we’re used to heavy rain, but this was ridiculous. So I checked on my phone to see if there was a later reservation available for dinner and there was an 8:40pm. A little late, but after telling Brett he was about to have all-you-care-to-eat crab legs, there was no taking it away. So I made the new reservation and when I went to cancel the old reservation it wouldn’t let me and told me I had to call the number listed. The number listed did NOT go to a Disney phone..I have no clue where it was making me call and I tried 3 times. So I called the normal Disney Dining line and was forced to speak to someone after giving the automated system ALL of my information.

Did I mention that we were still sitting in the car in the Art of Animation parking lot during all of this? I didn’t even think about going in to the concierge desk. Du-oh!

So I finally get someone to help me on the phone and wouldn’t you know…signal loss. Thank you, Sprint! I can always count on you to drop my calls.

At this point, our reservation time had passed 5 minutes before, so I told Brett just to drop me off and I’ll go into the hotel. Trent was sleeping, so I figured I would just go in and check us in and ask them to cancel my dining reservation.

While the cast member was checking me in and swiping all my Disney gift cards, I called the dining phone number again, since the concierge desk had a long line that I didn’t want to stand in, and had them cancel my dining reservation. He was about to charge me $10 until I told him I rescheduled. Phew, I’m glad I rescheduled.

Speaking of those gift cards…here’s a tip. I use my Target Red Card to get 5% off Disney gift cards at Target. I buy enough to pay for the hotel and food and a little leftover for souvenirs. It’s an easy way to get a more of a discount on all your Disney purchases.

When I went back out to the car (still downpouring) I told Brett what room we were in so we could head to the room until our reservation. His response? “How do you know what room we’re in?”

“Ummm, because I checked us in…what do you think I went in there for?”

Boy, his look of disappointment was like a knife going through me. “Oh, I thought you just went in to cancel the reservation. I thought we were going to check in with Trent so we could take a photo of him checking into his first Disney hotel.”

I felt so bad. Trent was still sleeping and I was so agitated by the rain and the reservation system that I didn’t even think about it, but I also wouldn’t have wanted to wake him up either. It was too late to do anything about it, so we headed to the room and just as we pulled up, he woke up…great timing, kid!

We were up on the 4th floor, looking over the pool in the Little Mermaid section, where we were spending the first 4 nights of our trip. Hmm, the 4th floor. It wasn’t fun carrying a baby up to the 4th floor or waiting for the elevator, especially after a long day, but the view was nice. We could see our old favorite hotel, Pop Century, across the water. The view was nice, minus the yucky clouds and rain. I’ll do a full AOA review/comparison of rooms in a separate post, but here’s a few photos in the meantime.

New rFID door locks!

Normally, we just live out of our suitcases, but this time, with a third family member, we decided to put Trent’s stuff in the drawers. The top drawer was for diapers, swim diapers, and wipes; the second drawer was for his snacks; and the third drawer was for his clothes. We also brought a pop-up mesh basket to put our dirty clothes in to keep them separate. This was a big help, as it was out of the way and ready to go into the washer when we returned home.

The hooks they provide were also very helpful this trip.

Within 2.5 seconds, toys were spread out all over the room. It was like we were back at home. Speaking of home, Trent made himself at home and started exploring immediately. We didn’t bring anything to babyproof, so we had to constantly pull him away from outlets, nightlights and trash cans. We definitely learned for next time.

While we were waiting for dinner, we looked at the weather for the next day for the millionth time. 60% chance of rain…all.day.long. We had big plans for Trent’s first day in a Disney Park, including watching Wishes! at the Tomorrowland Terrace Wishes Fireworks Dessert Party, but we didn’t want to risk it at 60% chance of rain. Looking back, I guess we could have risked it, but we just felt like the sky would have looked awful in photos and video and if it did end up raining, we wondered what would get cancelled or if we would just need to sit in the parks and be miserable. So I looked up if there were any Dessert Party reservations left for any other day that week. I thought it was a FAT CHANCE, but lo and behold, there was an opening for 3 people on Thursday. I snagged it up, cancelled our existing reservation and then proceeded to completely change everything we had planned for the week. I kind of wanted to cry…good thing I didn’t plan too much, but I was sad that Magic Kingdom would be the very last WDW park he’d visit for the first time. I just felt that things were not working in our favor and after thinking about this trip for several months YEARS, it wasn’t turning out the way we had planned. Thanks Mother Nature. I know Trent won’t remember it and he could care less, so we just reorganized our days and hoped we’d only have one day of rain, and not a week full of rain.

After that, it was time to head to the Beach Club for dinner at Cape May Cafe at 8:10 pm.

We had to wait a few minutes before being seated, so Trent watched some cartoons in the lobby while Brett went out to the Boardwalk to take some photos.

Cape May Cafe is an all-you-care-to-eat seafood buffet at dinner. We had never been before, I guess mostly because the reviews never stood out to us, but we enjoyed it very much. They offer crab legs, oysters, clams, salmon and stuff for land-lubbers too, like chicken, salad, pizza and steak.

This was the first of many meals where Trent took a walk on the wild side and got to taste some of our food. Kids under 3 eat free from buffets in Disney and since Trent had recently started eating more and more solid food, we took the opportunity to let him taste different things.

His favorite thing that night? The strawberry shortcake dessert. I couldn’t spoon the stuff into his mouth fast enough. I had to go back up and get more so we both could have some because he ate all of my first helping. What did I get myself into???

We were stuffed, but we walked waddled around the hotel and out to the pool area to look around.

Since it was still drizzling, we decided to head back to our hotel and call it a night and get ready for our first full day in a park this trip.

The walk back is borderline torture when you’re stuffed with Disney food! It’s a good thing it’s pretty, but that didn’t stop me from saying “Carry me” to Brett at least a dozen times.

I loved coming back to our room every night to see our window!

 

Click here to read Day 2!

 

To see all the full-resolution photos from Day 1 - click here to view them in Brett’s gallery!

If you enjoyed this post and need to see more Disney stuff, check out our Disney page!

 

xoxo

Lynn

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