The Happiest Place on Earth!

Yay! We're back from a super fun weekend and whirlwind tour of the Happiest Place on Earth! If you're keeping count, this is the boys' THIRD trip to Disney and YES that is insanely ridiculous, but I love it more than they do so I keep going back. {And I have another trip planned with one of my friends in April and I. AM. PUMPED.} This time around we planned a "Mystery Trip" and unveiled it to the boys the morning of. They knew we were going SOMEWHERE, they just didn't know WHERE. This was the first trip I'd ever made down in my LIFE without my mama, but she decided to stay home and wait for Baby Liam to make his arrival.

As soon as we arrived back from basketball (we had an 8:30AM game) and we told them where we were going we packed the rest of the car and hit the road. I think we left around 11AM. Not TOO bad.

We headed STRAIGHT to the Magic Kingdom when we arrived in town! We walked in at 4pm right when they were doing the Flag Retreat. This happens every day but we'd never seen it before! They do the Pledge of Allegiance and the Dapper Dans sing several patriotic songs while they lower the flag. It was really nice and very moving!

After the Flag Retreat wrapped up we hoofed it over to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad for our first Fastpass of the evening. We hadn't ridden this one before {I may have but I cannot remember...the boys definitely hadn't!} and realized that it was IN.SANE.LY crowded in the Magic Kingdom. Shew! It is no joke going on a holiday weekend!

After BTM we checked a few times on the Disney app and decided to head over to Hall of Presidents to see that show. James really liked this but Will was BORED TO TEARS. Bless him.

Because of the CRAZY crowd and all of the long wait times we were a little bit all over the park on this day. After Hall of Presidents we headed to Fantasyland to ride The Barnstormer - Goofy's roller coaster. This is a crowd FAVORITE at our house. If there's a short line we've been known to ride a few times in a row, but we had to wait for about 30 minutes on Saturday night.

We left The Barnstormer and headed back to use another Fastpass, but as we passed Ariel's Grotto we realized that there was only a TEN minute wait for her! My boys are decidedly anti-princess, but I've decided that if I plan our trips to Disney World they're going to have to bear a few girly things for me! HA! So I FORCED them to meet her {their first princess EVER} and I enjoyed every second. Both boys were just mortified that I was making them meet her, but they were also both pretty smitten, I think. She was very sweet.

We hustled on to Peter Pan to use our next FastPass after meeting Ariel. I think this is a really cute ride, but I just don't get why the wait is SO LONG! Tip: If you go to Disney and your kids are small, FastPass this one. If you ever walk by and the wait is under 20 minutes, RIDE. 

Later in the evening we stopped by Pirates to use our third FastPass and it was down SO we got to use it on anything we wanted to. Jungle Cruise is right next door so we spent it on that. I realize that we should've used it on something a little more worthwhile, but it was right there and it was getting late!

We stopped for supper at Peco Bill's again like last time. It was very good and lots of food. (And not just chicken fingers and french fries!) James got nachos, Will got corn dog bites, and Eddie and I shared a burrito. I scooted over to Adventureland while the boys were eating to grab a Dole Whip, too.

We intended to watch Wishes, but it was going on during our supper so we missed out. It was getting LATE by this point but we still wanted to see what else we could ride. The best option was Small World so we headed over there and rode. Will didn't remember it from last time and really enjoyed it.

Y'all, I cannot remember if we did ANYTHING else, but I know we headed out around 10:30. We stopped to take one last picture at the entrance and then went toward the monorail. As we exited, Eddie started talking to a cast member about whether it was ACTUALLY crowded like it felt. He said that he'd heard at 9pm there were 44,000 people in the park. Y'all. They don't hit "capacity" and begin turning people away until 75,000. And that's not even *true* capacity! Whoa.

We hopped on Monorail, grabbed a tram, and headed to our car way out in Cruella. {My only dislike about MK is that you have to park SOOOOOOOO far away. Last time we stayed at Contemporary. You get what you pay for! That was just about ten steps from our ROOM to MK. Lol!} Because the boys were SO tired but needed showers, we handed them our phones and told them to play until we arrived. We also did online check-in and we were able to go STRAIGHT to our room, which was really nice since it was so late. We stayed at All-Star Sports Resort this time and it was just "eh" for me. We do not stay in our room except to sleep on most of our trips, so we really don't NEED anything nice, but this was just exceptionally blah. Next time, I'd probably splurge and do a moderate instead of a value resort, but Eddie would probably disagree.

Once we'd all showered and laid our heads down is was already midnight and we had to get up bright and early to be at Epcot by 9AM. Woof. We slept like rocks all night. I'll share about Epcot soon!