Disney of the month club? Sign me up!

[lovedonaldduck]

I’m not sure exactly when I came up with the plan, perhaps it was always in the back of my mind, but, at some point this year I decided it would be awesome to spend time at a Disney park and/or a Disney resort every month in 2013. We are on track with completed trips through August plus a trip on the books for September and one for November. That just leaves October and December and my mission will be complete!

So, here is our cast of characters –

Me, Jennifer, Disney obsessed mom of 2 amazing little girls, wife of almost 13 years to my darling husband who humors me while I feed my Disney obsession. I’ve always loved Disney characters and movies but didn’t begin my love of Disney World until we took our oldest for her first trip when she was 3. Now I can’t get enough!


Peyton and I at Monsters University

DH, amazing husband and father who is not quite as impressed with Disney but is willing to let me indulge. He loves World Showcase, Disney resorts, Disney restaurants, and his girls!


Daddy and the girls in Celebration this past weekend.

Peyton, our oldest is 7 ½. She loves Disney princesses, Teen Beach Movie (please save me!), and her little sister. She has become a bit of a chicken when it comes to rides and the part of me that loves the thrills is having a hard time not pushing her. The part of me that remembers being terrified by my first ride on a wooden roller coaster when I was 7 and not wanting to ride another coaster until I was 10 is trying to be patient. I know she’ll come around in her own time.


My sassy 7 year old at Pop this past weekend.

Charlotte, our baby, will be 2 in October. She loves Disney Junior and everything about Disney parks, except getting in and out of her stroller. She has no fear of anything, especially water!


Charlotte checking out her accommodations at Pop

Rather than starting at the beginning, I’m going to start with our most recent trip, one night at Pop Century in August.

Look what we got in the mail prior to our trip!



I was so excited to be part of the Magic Band test program. Apparently, a little too excited, as I missed opportunities to make them work better for us. More about that later.

 

[lovedonaldduck]

Pop Century has been on my list of places to stay for a very long time. Whenever I look at value resorts as an option for trips, it is always the first one I check (I don’t count AoA yet, not until they start applying passholder and Florida resident discounts – I am cheap and hate to spend more money for the same room!). The stars aligned when I looked at August dates and Pop was just slightly more than the All Stars with our passholder discount.

The plan was to head out about 8am on Saturday, get to Celebration around 10:30 to explore prior to grabbing an early lunch and then heading to Pop to check in and head to the pool. We actually got on the road a little before 9, but it was no problem since we didn’t have any real plans.

My girls ready to hit the road.

The drive down was uneventful, the girls were mostly good although Peyton complained about being bored. I am currently adding to my September trip to-do list to print out some of the road trip activities I have pinned on Pinterest so I won’t have to deal with this again. We got off I-4 and headed towards Celebration. I was so disappointed, it looked just like Orlando…that is, until we drove past the Publix. This was the Celebration I expected and I was immediately in love and so was DH. We actually spent our lunch talking about what needed to happen so we could move to Celebration. I don’t know if it will be soon or if it will be when we are retired, but I think at some point we will have a Celebration mailing address. It is so quaint. It really reminds me of the little town in Ohio where my parents grew up. It also reminds me of the stereotypical Anywhere, USA complete with white picket fences and a town square. Maybe a little Stepford, but Stepford in a good way 
Here are the pictures from around our future home –



We ate lunch at the Celebration Town Tavern – the onion ring appetizer is an insane amount of food for $6. We stopped at Woof Gang Bakery where Peyton carefully (and slowly) selected a treat to bring back for our Great Dane, Cooper. Once we had explored Celebration Town Center, we loaded back into the car and explored the surrounding neighborhoods. Definitely where I always imagined I’d live to raise a family!

From there, it was a short drive over to Pop to check in….

 

[micandminforever]

I am looking forward to reading about your monthly visit, and alittle jealous that you are close enough to visit monthly.

 

[Poolrat]

So neat to do that - I really need to explore Celebration.

Came over from Meom's joining in for the fun.

 

[MotherandDaughter]

Joining in on your trip report! Can't wait to read more!

 

[dekkerdisneydreamer]

Joining in on the report from MeMom's! How lucky are you to have a once a month trip??

 

[lovedonaldduck]

Thank you all so much for coming over from MeMom's. I was afraid I might end up with a report with no readers.

I am looking forward to reading about your monthly visit, and alittle jealous that you are close enough to visit monthly.

It's about a 2.5 hour drive from our house to Disney property, with annual passes and little ones I feel like we should take advantage. I'm not sure we're going to make the full 12 months, it makes me nervous not having an October trip on the books yet and our passes expire in November. I'm not going to assume that we are renewing until it actually happens, if we don't renew, I'm not sure we'd do a December trip - although July and August were both park free trips since we are blacked out so it could still all come together.

So neat to do that - I really need to explore Celebration.

Came over from Meom's joining in for the fun.

I really wanted to see Celebration and on our July trip, our room wasn't ready for hours, so we thought it would be a good way to kill some time exploring and having lunch there. I didn't expect to come away thinking we needed to move there, but it's an exciting possibility to entertain. We'll see if it pans out. Even just as a stop off for lunch and walking around, it was a great side trip and we enjoyed doing something a little different.

Joining in on your trip report! Can't wait to read more!

Glad you are here!

Joining in on the report from MeMom's! How lucky are you to have a once a month trip??

We are blessed to live close by and be able to enjoy our family time at Disney!

 

[MeMom]

I think we should all move to Celebration!

We were going to drive over there this past summer, but we ended up going to a mall before we left instead.

I wish I was close to be in the Disney Trip of the Month club. One year, I did go six times. I liked that year. That will never happen again, I don't think.

You're gonna tell us about the massive pile of onion rings but give us no picture??? You've got me wanting onion rings before the sun has even come up.

Looking forward to more!

 

[lovedonaldduck]

I think we should all move to Celebration!

We were going to drive over there this past summer, but we ended up going to a mall before we left instead.

I wish I was close to be in the Disney Trip of the Month club. One year, I did go six times. I liked that year. That will never happen again, I don't think.

You're gonna tell us about the massive pile of onion rings but give us no picture??? You've got me wanting onion rings before the sun has even come up.

Looking forward to more!

Celebration could be the real life DIStown! I'd definitely check it out if you get a chance, I am totally in love!

I didn't think I'd get DH to go along with the Disney Trip of the Month, but so far he's been a good sport. An added benefit to taking all these trips is we're really figuring out what works for us and what doesn't. I don't think we'll do any more resort only one night trips - it seems like half your time is spent packing and unpacking and there's not a ton of time left for relaxing - which was the point. I'm also not sure we'll stay at a Value Resort again now that we are a family of 4. We'll give it one more go when Charlotte is out of a pack n play and a stroller but we really felt like we were tripping over one another and all of our stuff at Pop last weekend.

No onion ring picture I don't think DH will go along with food porn pictures . He already thinks I'm nutty enough, I don't know if he's ready to make the jump to taking pictures of our food. Maybe I can ease him in You'll just have to take my word for it - it was a huge heap of onion rings!

 

[lovedonaldduck]

Check in at Pop was a strange combination – a complete madhouse but easy and efficient. The lobby was overrun with guests checking in and CMs. With Pop being a test resort for the Magic Bands, they had a ton of extra CMs on hand to help out, in addition to kiosks and computers for scheduling Fastpass+ (I think that’s what all the computers were for, we didn’t mess with FP+ for this trip since it was a park free trip for us). But, check in for us went super quick and our room was ready! I can’t tell you how awesome it is for us when our room is ready. We really love to get settled in first thing, so it got our stay off to a nice start.

I’m just finding out that a lot of my pictures didn’t load to Photobucket, so we’ll have to use our imagination a bit. We had requested a lake view, highest floor and that’s just what we got – 4th floor of the Mickey Phone building facing the lake.




The view from our room.




That little sign on the refrigerator tells you that you don’t get a working refrigerator and you should not try to plug that one back in. We travel with lots of drinks and snacks (even for a one night stay) so I called to see if we could possibly get a fridge. They sent one due to the fact that our reservation showed an “infant” – Charlotte is not exactly an infant – she’ll be 2 in October, but since that is how Disney classifies the under 2 crowd, I went with it.




Our room.

We got unpacked, with the exception of the cooler, and got ready to head out for a swim.





Pool bound!

 

[dekkerdisneydreamer]

Before we were DVC members, POP was a staple in our Disney hotel repertoire, I love it there!

Okay, I just went to Zillow and put in Celebration, Florida and I will absolutely never be able to afford living there. I found a really beautiful southern style home that's only $750,000!!

 

[MotherandDaughter]

Love the Hotel pictures! Looks like you already are having fun!

I would love to move to Celebration but I think my parents would disagree...

 

[wiigirl]

Love your pics!

 

[lovedonaldduck]

Before we were DVC members, POP was a staple in our Disney hotel repertoire, I love it there!

Okay, I just went to Zillow and put in Celebration, Florida and I will absolutely never be able to afford living there. I found a really beautiful southern style home that's only $750,000!!

We are wannabe DVC members, right now renting is working great for us - until I can save up enough to pay cash for a DVC resale contract that is We're making a pretty good effort at trying every resort.

If we were to move to Celebration, we would have to move into a much smaller house to afford it but I'm still considering it. It just feels right to me and I definitely don't feel that way about where we live now.

Love the Hotel pictures! Looks like you already are having fun!

I would love to move to Celebration but I think my parents would disagree...

I was so excited to finally be at Pop, I took a ton of resort pictures.

We'll see what happens with Celebration. I love the idea of just running over to a park when we have nothing going on for a few hours in the evening or on a weekend but it was a lot more than just the proximity to Disney that we liked.

Love your pics!

Thanks!

 

[lovedonaldduck]

Wanted to let everyone know that I won't be getting around to an update today and I don't think I'll have one over the weekend either.

Hopefully I'll get Photobucket straightened out this weekend and then I can get an update done on Monday.

Thanks for hanging in there with me in the meantime!

 

[LookinUp]

We had the same warm fuzzy feeling about Celebration the first time we visited there, too. And the same deflated feeling looking at home prices.
Looking forward to swim time next.

 

[lovedonaldduck]

Unfortunately, there isn't going to be an update today either. Today is Peyton's first day of 2nd grade and Charlotte's first day at daycare so this weekend was devoted to getting them ready for that and not messing with Photobucket.

We all survived this morning - Peyton was in tears at school, Mommy was in tears at daycare, and Charlotte was in tears when Mommy and Daddy left her. Hopefully that was the end of the tears for the day.

Perhaps tomorrow there will be a Pop Century update as well as some first day of school pictures!

 

[MotherandDaughter]

Happy that the first day of second grade and daycare was filled with joy and sad to hear that it was filled with tears.

 

[lovedonaldduck]

And more tears for Mommy, just called to check in and found out that Charlotte refused to eat or drink anything at lunch. Oh, how I wish I could rescue her from daycare and go home and snuggle and baby her!

 

[lovedonaldduck]

My apologies again, Photobucket is not cooperating with my work computer and I didn't have a chance to try from home last night.