You should be able to order something OOP for your oldest, and save her credits for a future meal, but it's just going to depend on the individual restaurant or server or which way the wind is blowing. Last year, we saw a family of 5 adults share 3
DDP credits without buying anything else OOP, but that may not be your experience. Also, I know it's a lot of food at one sitting, but unless you plan on doing any 2 TS credit meals, I don't know how much saving of credits I'd do. It can be very filling not to mention time consuming to try to do more than one TS meal a day.
As for us, 2 adults and 2 kids (9 and 3), we spent <$20 extra OOP on food for 10 days, and that was lunch at a fast food restaurant the day we went to the Mousesurplus warehouse. We did have a grocery delivery when we arrived, so we had water, a few snacks, extra sodas for my dh, and most breakfasts covered. Honestly, we could easily have made do with the case of water and a few boxes of breakfast bar-type foods, because we had a lot left over; grocery food, leftovers from DDP meals and credits.
Here's our typical day: The kids and I hit the parks early, eating breakfast bars while waiting for the bus or the park to open. If the kids get hungry later in the morning, maybe we'll get a snack. Dh sleeps in and uses a CS credit for breakfast when he gets up. We meet up for lunch, splitting the other 3 CS credits between us. We use all 4 TS credits for dinner each night. If we're lucky, somewhere in there we'll be hungry enough to use a couple more snack credits here or there. By checkout day, we had something like 9 CS credits and 11 snack credits left, which we used on 4 breakfasts and 4 lunches (ugh), and snacks to take home.
