Disney World

My friends, we were crazy spontaneous and decided to go to Disney World on a family trip at the "LAST minute"!

The story is too good for me to forego all the fun details... We had wanted to go to Disney World for some time, but it's hard to know when the "best" time is to go when you have little ones. Thankfully, we have three friends, who were convinced that this was the ideal time to take our three little princesses!  They encouraged us to "seize the moment" and go to Florida for some warm sun!

One of the these friends even went so far as to invite our family to go with them on their upcoming Disney vacation over Spring Break!  She said, and I am quoting her verbatim, "It will be fun to stand in all the lines together!" :-)

Although, I love this friend dearly, I was not especially excited about paying a lot of money to stand in long lines with her! I then realized of course that we are not limited to Spring Break, because of the flexibility that comes along with being a homeschooling family!  Instead of waiting to go in March, why not go in a couple of weeks?

So, in "mild curiosity",  I called Disney to try to determine the cost of the trip AND I was pleasantly surprised to have some fun perks awaiting me!  For one, Miss Anna would get into the park, stay at the resort, and eat her meals for FREE because she is under the age of three (next month is her birthday)!  Two,  our family was selected to be given a promotion for FREE dining (during low season), which is a great value! :-)  Then, I looked at airline tickets and discovered tickets for $139 round-trip! Everything was lining up to do it, so Brad and I closed our eyes, and jumped in with both feet!!!  We were going to DISNEY!

Aunt Michelle (one of my dear friends who convinced us to do Disney) was very excited about our upcoming trip and gave each of the girls a princess pack of fun things to do on the plane, along with $20 for them to each buy a souvenir for Disney World!  I read a tip on-line to "stock up" on Disney gifts before you go. The younger girls, Faith and Anna really wanted a stuffed plush and chose Minnie and Daisy at the Disney store as one of their pre-trip souvenirs (they still had a little money left-over too).  

Then before you knew it, we were on the airport shuttle to get on the airplane...

The couple of weeks (really 19 days) leading up the trip were pretty eventful.  I had to try to make all my dining reservations for our trip (and plan what order we would do the parks and acquaint myself with the must-dos and low priorities for our trip), continue to homeschool, keep up with our other commitments, and we had a couple of health crisises during that time too.

First of all, the same night we booked the trip to Disney, Jillian had an unexpected rash all over her arm.  We  called one of our local doctor friends (and sent a photo of Jillian's arm) and asked him his opinion.  He said it looked like hives and that he wasn't overly concerned.  He thought it would be perfectly okay for us to wait until the next day to see the pediatrician. But he also said that if it spread, we should go to see the doctor immediately.  We monitored her all through the night (even setting our alarm for 1 AM), and all was fine.  But when Brad woke up at 5AM, Jillian had hives all over her, from her head (especially on her face) to her toes.  Brad woke me up, and we made the decision that she should go to the ER.  At the hospital, she was given steroids and an Epi pen in case of an emergency.  Thankfully, we never had to use the Epi pen, it all cleared up after a couple more days.   But we had a couple more stressful days with doctor appts. trying to figure out what was wrong.  In the end, it was concluded that it was most likely a virus.

Then the very next week, we went to the pediatric ophthalmologist to have a check-up appointment for Faith.  The doctor said that Faith's weak eye (from amblyopia) has not improved enough from the glasses and that we would need to start patching her strong eye. The good news is that she only has to do it for three hours a day, the bad news is that she most likely will have to continue wearing a patch for up to two years.  Faith has had such a positive attitude about it all and realizes the importance of wearing the patch to help her "not strong" eye.  :-) (The biggest complaint that she has is that she sometimes gets headaches from the strain of not being able to use her strong eye.    While on our vacation, one of the evenings, she got a migraine and actually threw up a few times in the night.  Please pray for her headaches!)

  The cool thing is that on our flight to Florida, Faith sat right next to a retired pediatric ophthalmologist.  He was very kind to Faith and gave Brad and I very encouraging news.  Patching is not a guaranteed method of fixing amblyopia (but it is normally the most effective under the age of 9).  However, the doctor said that when the amblyopia is related to a stigmatism in one eye, patching is very effective on correcting the problem!  He also complimented Faith on her fun sparkly patch!! 

After our flight, we took the Disney Express from the airport to the resort, so we didn't have to rent a car for our trip! We chose to stay at a the Port Orleans Riverside!  It had absolutely beautiful landscaping and both Brad and I appreciated it's southern theme!  

Port Orleans Riverside is a moderate resort.  It is a little closer to the parks then the value resorts.  But I will confess to you, the biggest reason I chose to splurge to the upgrade was being given the complimentary dining plan that included sit-down meals (the value resort's complimentary dining plan includes all quick service meals).  We also had a little more space than we would have had at a value resort; I felt like all five of us fit comfortably in our room.  We had two queens beds and a pull out twin bed.  Another benefit was we had a refrigerator in our room to put our milk for our cereal breakfast in the morning!  Lots of good stuff! 

Brad discovered this map in the lobby of the hotel, its's a little blurry, but in the center of the map you can see the town of "Holmesville" in Pike County, Mississippi!  It is named after Brad's grandfather's grandfather's father, William 'Bill' Stoval Holmes, who settled the area in 1812.  It was a proud Holmes moment for us and a great start to our Disney adventure!!