After a tiring, but great, arrival day at Disney World, I had hoped that Claire would be so tired that she would sleep through the night and then sleep until at least 6 a.m. Boy, was I wrong!
You see, my Claire Bear has never really been a good sleeper. She woke up during the night until we moved to Switzerland, which was 2 months ago, when she was 14 months old. So that first night at Disney World, she woke up twice during the night, needing one bottle and one cuddle session. Then, she woke up for the day at 5 a.m.! Let me remind you that we lived in Chicago at the time, so this was 4 a.m. Chicago time!
I could not get her to go back to sleep at this point, so I just tried to play quietly with her until my mom was ready to get up. At 6:30, I couldn't take it anymore and I had to wake my mom up. We had decided the night before that we would skip our Crystal Palace breakfast reservation so Claire could get a little extra sleep. Since extra sleep wasn't happening, I decided we were going to go for it with Crystal Palace.
I ever-so-gently woke my mom up and told her my idea. She was full of questions like "But don't we have to eat breakfast at the resort first?" Um, no, we don't have to eat breakfast first because we are going to breakfast! "But it's going to rain. How are we going to get there in the rain?" The same way we would get there if it wasn't raining! "But what about Claire's nap?" Claire will take a nap when we're at Magic Kingdom. Nonsense questions answered, my mom agreed to going along with my plan and we speedily got ready. We headed out to the bus stop to find about a billion other people who were also going to the Magic Kingdom. While we waited for a bus, I saw a family come to the bus stop with 4 kids, one of whom was in a stroller. Well, the kid in the stroller jumped out of the stroller, causing the stroller to be pulled backwards by the bag full of bottles that was hanging on the back of the stroller, and said bottles exploded all over the floor of the bus stop, splashing bystanders with root beer and orange soda.
Let me tell you, the parents whose drinks were ruined and the bystanders whose feet were now wet and probably going to be sticky were none too happy with this situation. I was thankful that I was neither the parents nor the bystanders. After that little bit of excitement, the bus pulled up and we were lucky to get on. By the time we got to Magic Kingdom, it had really started raining, so we covered ourselves and the stroller in ponchos and headed to Crystal Palace. This was my first time going into Magic Kingdom for an ADR before rope drop and I LOVED IT!!!
I must do it again!
The first glimpse of the castle on every trip is such a special and happy moment. This was even more special, though, because it was Claire's first-ever glimpse of the castle. She didn't seem too impressed, but I was happy to be able to show it to her anyways!
Almost-empty Magic Kingdom:
We arrived at Crystal Palace about 7 minutes late for our 8:05 reservation, but they sat us very quickly and soon we were eating the delicious array of foods that is offered by Crystal Palace.
As I was uploading these pictures to photobucket, I actually started to cry a little bit because Claire is SO different now from how she was then. Where has my baby gone?
Here's my little pumpkin enjoying some yummy breakfast
And checking out the ceiling
Pretty soon, it was time for characters! Claire's very first Disney character interaction was with....
Piglet!!!
Claire is a pretty shy girl, so I was very pleasantly surprised that she did not cry when Piglet was playing with her!
I love this picture:
Then came Eeyore
After Eeyore, Pooh came around, but Claire wasn't interested in characters anymore, so I let her eat and just waved as the rest of the characters came around.
Once we had all had enough to eat, we hurriedly packed up the diaper bag, paid our bill, and headed out to retrieve our stroller. We were late for a very important date!
We got to the stroller and realized that someone had moved it while we were inside the restaurant and it was SOAKED with rain water!!! Oops! So my mom pushed the stroller and I carried Claire and we walked as fast as we could, without running, over to Small World.
Coming up: Will we make it to the Small World DIS meet?!
and you just seemed so overjoyed to be there, makes me smile just reading it! we loved that boat ride to DTD when we stayed there in '05
Landon's done that a time or two as well.
