Confessions of an obsessive planner... Let the countdown begin!!

[-Hope-]

Great pictures. Those "evil eye" ones had me !

Yeah, the easter movies are pretty lacking. I bet your kids wouldn't be as into "Mickey's Great Clubhouse Hunt" as my 3 year old. That's okay that your easter day was lacking in the disney department, I think this whole free dining fiasco has all of us kind of stalled in the disney planning department.

That pink shirt is very "Minnie Mouse" without being over the top. I love it. I think I need to find a similar fabric and make DD a dress.

And, I think I'm going to need to hear more about "The Amazing Christmas Race" because that sounds awesome.

I didn't even think about her shirt being Minnie-ish but you're right; that's going to have to go on the packing list!

The Amazing Christmas Race is something I came up with several years ago when my nieces were about the ages of my kids now. My SIL was recently divorced and didn't have much money to buy gifts for her own kids much less everyone else's. We still wanted the family get together to be special and so I decided to just make it a really fun day for them somehow. I was really into The Amazing Race at that time so I decided to try to recreate it. I put clues in envelopes all over the house and when they reached their next clue they had to perform a task to get it. For example the clue might say: "Go into the room with the magic picture window (the tv) and find the eldest person (my FIL). You must make him laugh to get the next clue." Once I hid a clue in a pinata they had to break open, dh built a Plinko board and they had to get a certain number of points, we did an egg toss (in the garage), and just anything we could think of that was cheap and fun. Their final clue always led them to stockings full of dollar store goodies. Usually candy, silly string, glow necklaces, cool pens, etc. It was a lot of fun. After a few of years the older kids got tired of it so we stopped but my 17yo niece brought it up the other day at Easter and said we should do it again.

 

[-Hope-]

I love all your theme parties - I think once we get a little closer I'm going to borrow some of your ideas. My 2 youngest love to watch movies and I love to plan things so this is a perfect idea for us.

Thanks! It is a lot of fun to plan- we started pretty early though and sometimes Karen and I are racking our brains trying to figure out what we're going to do to fill up all those Mondays we have left.

If you need more ideas than you see here check out this thread. They've covered just about every movie and idea you can possibly imagine.

 

[-Hope-]

I got my order in from Snapfish! Both of the kids got an Epcot passport and prints for their autograph books. I slipped the prints into a brag book type photo album. I'm so happy with how everything turned out.

The autograph pages are about an even mix of character cards and generic cards. I got character cards of the people I thought we'd most likely see and then filled in the book with generics.

The cards slip easily out of the pages so we can do that while we're in line. Then we can use a butterfly clip to attach the cards to the cover so they don't fly away.

I absolutely love how these turned out! We can simply take out any empty pages and have space to add in pics of the kids with the characters. We can also easily just remove everything and put it in a scrapbook later but still have a cute book to carry around the parks. Of all the ideas I considered for their autograph books this one is by far my fave! I also love that I was able to order the prints instead of printing and cutting them all myself!

The passports are small- only 2x3- but they are super cute. The cover needed a small pic so I just used the Epcot MH and personalized it with their names. You can see that in the first pic above- the pics I took close up didn't turn out. They also have a title page and a page in the back with our resort name in case they'd get lost. They have two pages per country; one for the stamp and one for the CM to sign.

I love these too- they turned out so well and they were super cheap. And once again I didn't have to do all that printing and cutting.

ETA: I forgot to mention that I got the pages from donatalie's stuff on the disign boards.

 

[R and C's momma]

Oh my - those are some of the best autograph books I've seen!! Love the idea of using a photo book! Do you mind if the idea is copied? Our first trip is coming in June and I'm making goodie bags for the kids, including autograph books and would LOVE to also save on printing by doing it this way. Reading through this thread you are incredibly creative!!

~R and C's momma

 

[BabyEeyore]

Wow! I love those autograph books! I may just have to "borrow" that idea, too. DH and I were just talking the other day about whether we wanted to get an autograph book for DD for this next trip. Still not sure if we are (she'll be 2 and isn't a huge fan of strangers right now) but I am going to keep this in mind for sometime in the future!

 

[-Hope-]

Oh my - those are some of the best autograph books I've seen!! Love the idea of using a photo book! Do you mind if the idea is copied? Our first trip is coming in June and I'm making goodie bags for the kids, including autograph books and would LOVE to also save on printing by doing it this way. Reading through this thread you are incredibly creative!!

~R and C's momma

Wow! I love those autograph books! I may just have to "borrow" that idea, too. DH and I were just talking the other day about whether we wanted to get an autograph book for DD for this next trip. Still not sure if we are (she'll be 2 and isn't a huge fan of strangers right now) but I am going to keep this in mind for sometime in the future!

Thanks! I absolutely LOVE the way they turned out too. If you are going to get photos just be sure to get the matte finish and use a retractable sharpie instead of a pen. A regular pen won't work but the sharpie's work well on the matte finish (but not the glossy).

 

[BabyEeyore]

Thanks! I absolutely LOVE the way they turned out too. If you are going to get photos just be sure to get the matte finish and use a retractable sharpie instead of a pen. A regular pen won't work but the sharpie's work well on the matte finish (but not the glossy).

Cool, thanks for the tip!

 

[lledman]

Your books look wonderful. I love the way your passports turned out. I think we are going to pass on autograph books this year but I second guess that thought everyday.

 

[-Hope-]

To be honest I second guessed myself about the autograph books all the time. I'm not sure if they're really going to be 'into it' but I wanted to try. That's what I love about these books, they were cheap and easy so if it falls flat it's no big deal.

 

[R and C's momma]

Where did you find the brag books? Did you get them through SnapFish or did you buy them separately? Also when you ordered your prints ... did you do so by uploading the file to Snapfish? I'd just love to do this based on your experience and not too much trial and error.

I love how versatile these are - not sure about autographs here either (kids 5,9, & 11) but the cards are easily exchanged for photos of the trip and the whole thing is not a bust. LOVE IT!

Thank you in advance for your help (and suggestion to get prints in matte!)

Amy

 

[-Hope-]

Where did you find the brag books? Did you get them through SnapFish or did you buy them separately? Also when you ordered your prints ... did you do so by uploading the file to Snapfish? I'd just love to do this based on your experience and not too much trial and error.

I love how versatile these are - not sure about autographs here either (kids 5,9, & 11) but the cards are easily exchanged for photos of the trip and the whole thing is not a bust. LOVE IT!

Thank you in advance for your help (and suggestion to get prints in matte!)

Amy

I got the brag books in the photo album section of K-mart. They had them at Target when I looked there so I'm thinking that just about anywhere you can get a photo album you can get the brag books.

To get the disigns I looked through the stuff on the disign boards and when I found something I liked I saved it to my computer. Most of the DISigners have a link to their photobucket and/or 4shared accounts so you can look through their stuff. When you save it to your computer be sure to click on the thumbnail and save the larger picture- the tiny thumbnails will get distorted when you try to enlarge them. After I had everything on my computer that I wanted I uploaded them to Snapfish just like I would digital pictures.

One side note- some of Natlies autograph pages have a blank space at the top so the image is still visable if people want to have them spiral bound. I didn't want mine spiral bound and when I tried uploading them to SF the first time it was cutting off the bottom of the page. I simply used my photo editing software to crop the pages and re-uploaded.

HTH!!

 

[R and C's momma]

That does help, thank you very much for all of the info!! I had been looking/saving some DISigns I have discovered through the threads but only saving the thumbnail versions and they looked so small -- now I know why

If mine turn out half as good as yours I'll be in good shape!

Adding the brag books to my list of supplies I need to get and can't wait to get started! 11 weeks worth of projects to keep me busy to pass the time

Thanks again!!
Amy

 

[-Hope-]

You're welcome! 11 weeks is really soon- I'm so excited for you.

 

[-Hope-]

I called Disney under the guise of adding tickets. Well, I really did need to do this since we won't be getting homeschool tickets but wasn't going to do it until later- however I wanted to check and be sure I didn't have any pins attached to my account that I wasn't taking advantage of!

So, I called, upgraded our 1 day base ticket to 6 day base tickets and...








NOTHING, ZILCH, NADA, BUPKISS.

I had a very matter of fact CM who assured me that I could call back when/if any fall promos were offered but for right now there's nothing past 8/14. Her advice- just keep checking the website.

Honestly it's a little refreshing to have a CM who doesn't pretend to know more than they actually do but a little hope would have been nice.

Oh well, I saved a few more vacations on both my and Robbie's account and I added mail communication to my profile. Previously I only had email- what the heck was I thinking when I set that up??

I'm still confident that it's all going to work out and we'll get a great deal but I figure it doesn't hurt to cover all the bases.

 

[Victoriasmom98]

I hear you, Hope!!! I keep going to the stupid Codes & Promotions thread thinking there will be something there.......nope......ugh!

 

[-Hope-]

I thought I'd share one of my obsessive projects with you guys...

I found MH border stationary when I was looking for autograph pages and thought it was cute so I saved it, not really sure what I was going to do with it. I recently started using a new photo editing software (Photoscape) and started playing around with some things. I found some Disney font that was compatible with the software so I downloaded it and then put our itinerary on the MH stationary. I'm going to print them out index card size and put them on the kids lanyards so they'll always know what our plans are w/o having to ask me 500 times a day.

A sample...

I also made an emergency contact card on this stationary for each of the kids with our cell phone numbers. Jace got separated from us at Six Flags once and it was AWFUL! He was smaller then and I don't think he'd wander like that now but I'd rather just make the card (placed behind other cards so people can't just see it) and know that they can contact us if, heaven forbid, they were to get separated from us for some reason.

ETA: The photoediting software won't allow me to do a different color text within the same text box so I'm just going to highlight the show time I want when I print it out. I wanted to leave all of the times on though in case we would happen to miss one and needed to catch the next one.

 

[lexmas]

That's a great idea, giving them cards with the schedule on it. It makes a lot of sense so you don't have to answer "what are we doing next" 1,000,000,000 times this trip! I never would have thought of that. Cute!

 

[Twoboysnmygirl]

I never thought of it either...you are holding out on me Hope! How many other ideas do you have that you haven't told me about?!!?!?

 

[-Hope-]

Not holding out- just bored and for some reason when that happens my mind automatically wanders to Disney.

 

[Victoriasmom98]

None of us reading would ever understand that concept!!!