How would you break up 10 days with a 5 and 3 year old?

Going to WDW late April 2016 (not Easter time) . I'll have a 5.5 year old and an almost 3 year old. I'm wondering how many days we should do parks, how many rest days we should have, and how many days we should do at each park. We're early risers so I imagine we'll be opening up the parks and going back for a mid-day rest, going back to the parks some evenings. I'd like to fit a character meal in there somewhere (on a rest day? park day?). The pass price differences are so small between 6-10 day passes, so price isn't a huge issue there.

HELP I really don't know how much little ones can handle with everything going on. I wanted to go for a long time for our first trip so that I wouldn't put tremendous pressure on my family to rush around and get things done. I'd like to take our time and get to see as much as we can but don't want to get sick of it all.

Thanks in advance!

We never really bought in to the whole go back to the resort for a rest thing with our kids. We would just have our kids take naps in the stroller while at the park which would give us some quieter time to see some things we wanted to see.

The best thing I would say is don't do back to back park days. Have rest days in between park days. Only you know what your kids can handle. We would do rope drop to park close with our little ones, but as I mentioned, the days included at least one nap and sometimes they just couldn't stay awake for Wishes.

Our family would do arrival, 2 park days, day off, 2 park days, day off, 2 park days, departure day.

So 6 park days though we might do half a day arrival and departure.

We'd do 1 day of HS and AKL, 2 EPCOT days and 3 Magic Kingdom days. Yes that is 7 days. So we'd either go for part of the day on arrival or departure.

That being said going back mid day never worked for us. Then again neither did getting there at opening every day.

We have a 5 and 4 year old and we go to a park for ten days straight. For us the key is how much time you spend there each day. We go for from five to seven hours and that's it. Some days we rope drop, some we go in the evening. But we find the kids are fine if you minimize time spent in the blazing sun, and make sure there is down time for the resort pool or just relaxing in the room each day.

If number of days there isn't an issue financially than the more the merrier. If you want to take breaks in the middle of the day for rest I would IMO do 3days MK 1day AK 1 day Epcot. We skip HS, too many shows for our taste. Rest on arrival day and maybe 1 rest day in the middle if you want for just resort time. We are going in September and plan on only doing 3 late nights (as in bed after getting back from fireworks ~10pm) during a 7 night stay with naps hopefully each day. But every child is different. You could take your two to say a six flags or some nearby amusement park and see how things go then plan from that experience. We know that after heavy activity for 5 or so hours equals a necessary nap around 3 and that if they nap they can last until 10pm or so without meltdowns or cranky pants.

We also plan on breaking up MK by lands to decrease walking, make it more thematic, and less burnout as we won't be doing the exact same things each time we're there.

I would get the 1o day hopper passes. I would plan to do EMH parks on many days if your are early risers. I would play each day by ear as far as rest and returning to parks. We would rest most days and return to a different, non EMH park for the evening. Most days we would return to the resort for the night, early enough to get to bed early if you are going to be up early.
If the kids seem to get tired, take a morning off to spend at the pool. We have a pool at home and we want to spend our time in the parks so that is rare for us. Working in a character meal in will be easy, just be sure to plan to be in the park of the meal for your scheduled time.

I have two boys who are 6 and 4. Here's my advice to keep them busy/happy...

1. Bring your own stroller if you can. The kids can nap or relax between attractions.
2. Buy lots of glow sticks/bracelets at Target (in the dollar section) or at the dollar store. They keep the kids happy/occupied every night. One evening we were on a Disney bus stuck in traffic headed towards HS. It took almost an hour to get to HS from the WL, that's how bad it was. Thankfully, we had 2 tubes of glow bracelets and gave them out to all of the kids on the bus. It saved about a dozen meltdowns from kids and adults alike.
3. In Epcot, our boys loved Kidcot. It allows you to visit each country, most of the stations are in the back of the country so you really get to see a lot. They stamp your child's "Duffy" or "Perry" with a passport-like stamp and write your child's name in that country's native language. My boys loved it!!!
4. Pressed pennies are another favorite of our children. Allows us to go basically anywhere without a meltdown because the boys know that there are different pennies at every location we get to visit.

Hope these ideas help a bit. I swear the glow sticks/bracelets were a lifesaver on our last trip.