We left home at 4:25am today, and made great time driving down. We stopped once to switch drivers & get coffee, and once for breakfast around 9am and then drove the rest of the way to the Swan hotel. The girls are great little road trippers, and we definitely rely on our car "tv's" to help us all through it! Emmy went right back to sleep after we got her out of bed this am, but Cameron stayed awake for about an hour, and they both woke up at 7am. We gave them some milk boxes & dry cereal and turned on a movie and they were good to go! Dan drove the first leg until 7, and then I took over until we stopped for breakfast at 9. Breakfast started rocky, as Cameron was pretty upset crying that her stomach hurt. We were a little alarmed at first, since she was crying so hard about it, but we soon realized she hadn't gone potty yet that morning (her pull up was dry) and she was so uncomfortable from holding it. But she wouldn't go on the potty either. I tried to tell her she could just go in her pull up, but she didn't want to do that either... but eventually nature took its course and she went. A lot. So after a quick change of her pull up & pants, she was a completely different kid; happy & ready for breakfast! Cracker Barrel is our go to breakfast stop on our road trips, and it did not disappoint today.
We made it to the Swan hotel at 12pm, so our room wasn't ready since we were a few hours early. We didn't mind at all though, and enjoyed changing into shorts & short sleeves for a walk around the hotel property, and got a little swim in too. The only problem with our room not being ready was Cameron didn't end up getting a nap today. By the time we got into our room, we only had about an hour & a half to rest and get ready before our dinner reservation at Chef Mickey's. So the girls laid on the bed & watched a show and read books for a little bit, but neither one slept. We all showered & changed and were on our way to an early dinner!
Our hotel is nice, and I believe it was recently renovated. There's a lap pool which is heated, and then a "grotto" pool which has some waterfalls & a small slide, but it didn't seem to be heated. Since it was cloudy when we swam today we stuck with the heated pool, but i'm sure we'll get into the other one later this week on our day off! There's also a sandy beach area on a large pond, there's no swimming there but you can go on swan boat rides. There's also water taxis right outside our hotel that will take us to Hollywood Studios or Epcot, but we'll have to take a bus to get to Magic Kingdom.
We have a junior suite for our room, which is a great size for our family. It's an L shaped room with a king bed and a pull out couch for Emmy to sleep on, and we asked for a crib for Cameron. I debated about the crib for her, but seeing as she's still in one at home, and the last time we stayed in a hotel she ran out of her bed until midnight, we felt this was the best way to go. She's still not asleep yet (been in bed almost an hour), but it's the first night, hopefully the novelty will wear off quickly! The room also has a balcony which is nice for Dan & I to be able to sit on after the girls go to bed, but tonight we're so tired that we're actually in bed too!
Chef Mickey's is at the Contemporary resort, and is a character meal. Since we drove down and used Dan's hotel points for our hotel stay, we decided to splurge on Character meals so the girls would have some good character interactions while we're here. It was pretty inevitable that Cameron would fall asleep on our 7 minute drive over to the restaurant... So Dan carried her in & she actually stayed asleep for about half an hour. But once the characters started getting close to our table Dan woke her up. She wasn't too thrilled (as I'm sure you can imagine) to be woken up, and honestly I think if we had let her she might've slept through the night. But we had to meet Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and Pluto!! Cameron pretty much hid from all of the characters, but Emmy was very excited and into meeting them! She really liked getting them to sign her autograph book and was great about taking pictures with them. I prepped her earlier today that we would be taking A LOT of pictures on this trip! haha, poor girl. I purchased the "memory maker" from Disney, which basically gets you any picture a Disney professional photographer takes while you're here. You just have them scan your magic band (which is your ticket into the park) and it saves to your account, so when you log in online all your pictures are there to download! It's so worth us not having to bring our nice camera with us, and us all being able to be in the picture without bugging a random person to take a picture for us!
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| Sleepy Cams... |
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| She woke up! |
We just headed back to our room after dinner, and attempted to get the girls to bed early. However they were both pretty wound up, and clearly caught a second wind so they're both still awake as I type at 8:48pm. I know that seems early for a normal day, but it's late for a day where we're all out of bed at 4am, and the girls only got another 2-3 hours of sleep! We have an 8am breakfast reservation at Cinderella's castle tomorrow, which is feeling like poor planning on my part, but it'll get us into the park nice & early and we plan on coming back after lunch for a rest/nap time tomorrow afternoon.
More to come!...
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