Pre-trip details and Introductions:

(You probably know all of us by now, but some updates anyway!)

Who:

Me (Jaime) – former middle school teacher, currently stay-at-home-mom. It’s no secret that I’m a little Disney-obsessed! For a long time, I tried to be okay with the one-big-tripevery-few-years routine, but finally lost patience and decided to start making use of the fact that my whole family lives in Florida (and we fly down there at least twice/year to visit) So I declared that we would begin adding short Disney trips to our family visits! I have come to really love these “mini-trips”, and enjoy always having some sort of trip in the works.

Brian (DH) – software engineer at Adobe. It has actually been a tough year for him. He got a nasty case of pneumonia last spring, and is still not fully recovered. It doesn’t affect him too much now for normal daily activities, but he is very into active things like mountaineering, snow climbing, skiing, etc. And it has been a constant source of frustration and stress for him that he can’t do those things at the level he was a year ago. But he does seem to be making progress at least. He “likes” Disney, but doesn’t love it the way I do. And actually complains now that we “go too often”, though without fail, once we are there he is always loving it, and never wants to leave.

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Chapter 0. Pre-trip Tediousness

Just in case I get carried away and don’t explain well as I’m going…

The Cast: 

Me (Jaime) – stay-at-home mom and master Disney planner 🙂
Brian (DH) – didn’t come on this trip, but I think I mention him a time or two
Lily (DD, 11 yo) – recently started middle school, and deep in the throws of adolescence. Enough said, lol!
Owen (DS, 4yo) – impatient, active, often an emotional basket-case, and generally scared of everything

My Mom
My Dad

Cassie & Cam – usually refer to them as “the cousins” collectively, (my brothers kids, 14 and 12 years old), they live in Naples with the rest of my family and came to Orlando with my parents

The idea: 

We needed to get away somewhere for a long weekend while Brian was off canyoneering in Utah, (because it didn’t seem fair for us to stay home, ha!) and visiting my family in FL made the most sense. After all, I had a brand new niece to meet! And what good is a trip to FL if we can’t sneak in a little Disney first??

Our dates collided perfectly with MNSSHP, so that seemed like a good excuse to get in some park time. Usually in these mini-trips with my parents, we stick to DTD and the resorts, so I was a little nervous about how this would go.

They really wanted to bring the cousins along, and talked their parents into letting them miss a couple days of school for it. (Lily was missing 3, oops!) I figured she would enjoy having some buddies her own age along, especially since they were old enough to go park-storming on their own.

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