Shank Family, Party of 15! Twins, Tweens, and a Toddler oh my!

[bugsmama11]

Hello everyone!

This is my first TR and I'm excited to get the planning going (even if I've been stalking the boards for months now!) We will be at WDW from May 15-May 25!

A little bit on our family: I will be married to my DH for 7 years in June and we will be together for 10 in July, but friends long before soul mates! We now have our precious little bug, who is 2, Miranda. DH has a large family and his parents are taking us all on this magical trip in May. We have Gran and Gramps, SIL and her DH and 3 girls (fraternal 10 yr old twins) and a 6 yr old, and SIL and DH and their 3 boys (11yr old and soon to be 8 yr old identical twins). They took us all back in '08, but we were 1 kiddo short and much younger!

Now on with the trip: DH's parents are renting points for us all to stay in 2-2br villas at OKW, just like our last trip. They are also paying for flights and 5 day park hoppers for everyone. I'm very blessed to be a part of a family that can do such a awesome thing for their kids and grandkids!

My MIL booked us all on Delta, but we are leaving at the crack of dawn! Our flight into ATL is at 6am out of STL! We will be flying into ATL and meeting up with the rest of the family who will be coming from PA and NC. Then it's into Orlando and onto magical express to start our wonderful trip.

Sidenote: My DH and I haven't had a vacation together since our Miranda was born, so we are staying a couple extra days in the World to have some of our own family time. We will move from OKW to ASsports, and then leave on Sunday the 25th. We are planning on adding 2 days to our park hoppers and will try to get in on the madness that will be the 24 hour event at the MK!

 

[bugsmama11]

Now my MIL has took it upon herself to make a outline of an itinerary for the trip, it goes something like this:

Thursday: Arrive at OKW, dinner at resort, pool time and maybe a boat ride to DTD for Ice Cream later?

Friday: MK

Sat: AK in the morning with a RFC ressie at 1:30 for lunch, the later onto the Contemporary for the Pirates and Pals cruise.

Sun: DTD day, lunch at TREX at 12, then free day!

Mon: Epcot

Tues: MK morning, Epcot afternoon with Dive Quest for DH and FIL and maybe BIL too!

Wed: HS and dinner at 1900 PF @ 4:45, then back to resort because they have to all be up for ME at 430am! But we are staying and moving onto ASsports on Thurs.

She pretty much has it covered...She is truly amazing!

 

[Jackiemarie21]

I saw you on STLMickeyMom's TR and noticed you are also from STL! Its so nice to meet so many WDW fans from the Lou!

 

[STLMickeyMom]

i'm here! what an awesome family you've got!

we did the pirates and pals cruise a couple of trips ago. it was so fun! you'll love it!

can't wait to hear about the dive quest! is that the one where you get to swim with the dolphins? we've never looked into those, so i get them confused.

excited to read more!

 

[AprilRenee]

Joining in too!

 

[bugsmama11]

I saw you on STLMickeyMom's TR and noticed you are also from STL! Its so nice to meet so many WDW fans from the Lou!

Hello...happy to see other people from our area too!

i'm here! what an awesome family you've got!

we did the pirates and pals cruise a couple of trips ago. it was so fun! you'll love it!

can't wait to hear about the dive quest! is that the one where you get to swim with the dolphins? we've never looked into those, so i get them confused.

excited to read more!

We are excited for Pirates and Pals...all the kiddos don't know about it, so it's gonna be a surprise (Good things they aren't on here).

Dive Quest is actually where you get to Scuba Dive in the aquarium at Epcot. My DH, FIL and BIL did it last trip and they had a blast. All of them are certified divers, in fact my FIL has something like 800 dives under his belt and he's 66 (I think?)! It was neat to see them all in the tank. After we saw them dive, we all took the kids to see Turtle Talk. I'm not sure all the kids are going to want to do that again now that they are older, but I know Miranda and my 6 yr old niece will like it.

Joining in too!

Happy to have ya!

 

[bugsmama11]

I took a trip with Miranda out to my in laws place in PA last April. DH (Eric) couldn't go bc of work, and since I'm a stay at home mommy right now, they invited us out for the week.

I was already planning a trip for Oct. 2015 with my parents for all of us to go during MNSSHP. I'm a big Disney fanatic and so bringing this idea up to my parents for a trip was a no brainer! Miranda is their only grandchild and so it wasn't hard to convince them to join in the fun.

My MIL brought up the idea that they would love to take us all back for a big family trip while it was still feasible (they happen to own their own successful business) and the kids would enjoy it. My thought was "I'm 32 and will never out grow Disney, how could these kids not enjoy it, but I know that it's not everyone's cup of tea once they get older."

I of course, said that it would depend on getting Eric off of work, because he was really the only adult that we had to worry about? So I kind of put our other trip on hold to be able to afford to go on this one. We had to wait until around the end of September last year to be able to put in for vacation this year for Eric. So we essentially had to tell his mom that these were the dates we could go and hopefully it would work out?

I began to save for food and souvenirs by adding money to a Disney GC back last September (putting back $50 out of DH's paydays). I was debating about using Target to buy the prepaid $50 ones, but I really didn't want the hassle of keeping up on the balances on like what could be 20 cards...I know some people have said that if you take all your cards into a Disney store, sometimes they will combine them into one card for you? I just thought getting them thru the Disney store was easier for our family. However, we did have a hiccup a couple months back when I wanted to reload our card and for whatever reason the ds cashier couldn't get it to load, so she had to put the cash I had on a different card. I was at first kind of annoyed bc having it all on one card made the most sense to me at the time, but now I'm glad we have 2 and I will just spread out the rest of our money between them. That way if heaven forbid we should misplace one, we still have money readily available.

By our trip I should have right at $900 on the cards! Some thought I was crazy to put all that on cards bc what if something happened and we couldn't go and then we had all that money tied up on cards? Well I'm not a great saver and I know that if I hadn't put the money on gc's then it would have been spent somewhere on something...that's just life! So I just figured if that were to happen that we would use it towards this coming Christmas and then save the rest for our other trip.

So my MIL was already shooting for mid May for us to go. We played around with dates until we knew Eric's vacation was confirmed at work. But we had to rearrange some things due to the fact that my nieces are in dance and their end of year recital got scheduled for Memorial weekend! So with them needing to be home on the 22nd bc they have rehearsals that Friday, that's when we decided that we would stay a few extra days.

 

[bugsmama11]

So with my MIL renting points for OKW off of their very good friends, I knew we would have to wait awhile before we could find out what dates we could book. However, was not expecting it to not be until mid Feb before they could! This seemed like forever away....

So by now it's late fall and I'm finally starting to look at things to do and now that I've started budgeting out gc's out, it now seems legit...like we really were going to be able to make this trip happen. I felt kinda bad that I had to shelf our other trip, but I was still getting ideas...

Fast forward to mid FEB and waiting anxiously to find out if our dates were going to work? With DH's schedule, it really had to be certain dates because he only really gets 5 days vacation, but he attaches his to days off the week before and then to his long weekends on the other end.

We got the call from DH's mom that it was a go!!! It benefited us and my SIL in order for our nieces to be able to do their dance recital.

Now to schedule this crazy family of 15!

 

[STLMickeyMom]

i'm so glad everything worked out schedulewise and you were able to get dates that worked for everyone! I can't imagine trying to schedule things for a group of 15! that's a lot! but you all will have so much fun!

 

[bugsmama11]

Sorry I've been a little MIA, we had new carpet installed in our living room last Friday and both Miranda and I had doc appointments, then Saturday was my good friend's wedding and yesterday was my mom's bday!

Anyhow, on with this crazy trip...my inlaws are amazing and decided to pay for everyone's flights. They frequent Delta because they go down to the island of Roatan (they have a condo there) and my FIL scuba dives. So my MIL wanted to rack up some extra air miles and knew that we should have been able to get a good rate for a group of 15.

I personally wanted to to fly on Southwest here out of STL because the flights were a bit cheaper, had better times in and out and you don't pay baggage.

But I can be extremely grateful that my inlaws could do this for everyone and so Delta it is! The problem we face is that we are here in STL, they are in PA with my one SIL and her family and the other SIL is in Charlotte. So she decided it would be best if we all were able to get into ATL and try to be on the same flight into MCO so that we were already all together. Getting all of us into ATL at a decent time meant that we all needed to be pretty much on the first flights out of STL and PA, but our NC crew could be just a bit behind us since they were closer to ATL.

So we will have to be at Lambert airport around 4AM!! WITH A 2 YR OLD!!
I probably won't even go to bed the night before, between being excited and worried about if I packed enough or too much...but isn't that the fun of going to Disney?

 

[STLMickeyMom]

4 am? Ouch.....you really will need IV coffee! So how 2 is your DD? Like just turned 2 or closer to 3? Here's are some things I did for both our girls when we went (the first time Madison was about 3 months away from being 3). The dollar stores have lots of Disney stuff. I got lots of books, puzzles, crayons, color books, little toys--just about anything Disney I could find--for not much and packed it all in their bags. They had lots to do and enough that we shared with other kids on the flight--which kept everybody happy. I also found fun stuff in the goody bag aisle at party city. The best thing I found there were these tiny cameras. You look through it and push the button and the the picture inside changes. Sort of like a viewmaster. I also found Disney themed fruit snacks. Basically I had toys and snacks ready at all times. We didn't have such an early flight or a layover, but it kept the girls busy and happy.

Also, if you think the kids in your group will want glow in the dark stuff at the parks, load up on it at the dollar store before you go. That was the best advice we got before our first trip with the girls. It's so much cheaper and we shared with other kids too. I found that if I had glow stuff already they didn't care about the $20 light up wand in the park.

 

[bugsmama11]

4 am? Ouch.....you really will need IV coffee! So how 2 is your DD? Like just turned 2 or closer to 3? Here's are some things I did for both our girls when we went (the first time Madison was about 3 months away from being 3). The dollar stores have lots of Disney stuff. I got lots of books, puzzles, crayons, color books, little toys--just about anything Disney I could find--for not much and packed it all in their bags. They had lots to do and enough that we shared with other kids on the flight--which kept everybody happy. I also found fun stuff in the goody bag aisle at party city. The best thing I found there were these tiny cameras. You look through it and push the button and the the picture inside changes. Sort of like a viewmaster. I also found Disney themed fruit snacks. Basically I had toys and snacks ready at all times. We didn't have such an early flight or a layover, but it kept the girls busy and happy.

Also, if you think the kids in your group will want glow in the dark stuff at the parks, load up on it at the dollar store before you go. That was the best advice we got before our first trip with the girls. It's so much cheaper and we shared with other kids too. I found that if I had glow stuff already they didn't care about the $20 light up wand in the park.

Miranda won't be 3 til Dec...I already have a collection of stuff from the dollar isle at Target and stuff here and there that I got. Also my MIL is sending us a fanny pack full of things to occupy her time. She did that for all the kids!
Thanks for the glow in the dark idea! I know we will probably get her something, but having the other stuff on hand will probably make it much easier to avoid having to have something every night we are there.

 

[bugsmama11]

So since DH said it was alright if we stayed a few extra days, I had to book what resort we wanted. I really wanted to try AoA, but since the LM rooms were not part of the Spring promotion, I decided that we would have to wait and try it another time...

I took a look at all of the values and ultimately decided that since we had stayed at ASsports before that we would just try there. I booked us a standard room, however hoping to see about putting in a request for a king bed room.
We have an air mattress for Miranda because she isn't comfortable much anymore in a pack n play. I would let her sleep with us, but that depends on the night, because her daddy is a sucker for cuddles! We plan to use the air mattress at OKW too, because we are staying with my SIL and her husband and our nieces and I know that the girls will want to do a slumber party out in the living room of our villa We may not use the air mattress there, but just depends?

So I booked just a room only package because since my inlaws are buying everyone's park tickets, we plan to just add 2, maybe 3 days, onto what they bought for us when we get down there. They will leave Thurs the 22nd to head home so we have Thurs, Fri and Saturday yet to stay and play. We really need this short time because we rarely get to do anything due to DH's work schedule.

 

[bugsmama11]

So we finally got the beginnings of some Mickey Mail the other day! We got our here's your vacation details and the welcome booklet. Then yesterday we got our invitation for FP+, however....

I found out from my MIL that they can't get all our tickets bought until we get there! They had a major expense on a work truck come up and decided it would be best to get that taken care of. I totally understand, but now I'm kinda bummed

I know that from what I've read on here and other places that day of bookings can be tricky? I really want Miranda to see Ana and Elsa, but if out of the 3 days that we are at MK, I can't manage to pull a FP, then I guess we will wait til our next trip. I know she's only 2 and won't remember any of this trip, but I can tell her through pictures, what she was able to do when she gets a little older.

So it appears we will all we trying to figure out of FP's the night we arrive...I can see it now, all the adults gathered around the table with our tablets and phones out trying to decide what the 15 of us want to try and accomplish?

It is what it is and again I'm extremely grateful that we can have this vacation in the first place, but since Disney changed it's way, it does make it just a little bit harder to figure it all out....

 

[STLMickeyMom]

That's a bummer about fastpasses, but you never know what kind of pixie dust will be sprinkled on you when you get there. I always have to remind myself it's ok not to get to everything, just gives you a reason to plan your next trip, right?

 

[bugsmama11]

Ok a little off the trip rail here, but I'm looking at ordering a couple of shirts for Miranda for our trip. I have a few that I'm partial to and these are from Etsy, but I do have a few local ladies that can make something for me too.

I'm leaning towards these:
Carriage
http://img1.etsystatic.com/034/0/8733451/il_570xN.543120459_fv1b.jpg
Pink Minnie
http://img1.etsystatic.com/006/0/7093583/il_570xN.384593623_784i.jpg
Castle
http://img0.etsystatic.com/039/0/7776494/il_570xN.526053572_e1k2.jpg
Minnie Ears (This is just a digital file for an iron on transfer)
http://img0.etsystatic.com/017/0/9021843/il_570xN.565819744_la1w.jpg

I know I will need to order ASAP, because of turn around times for some of these...anybody have a favorite to help me narrow it down?

I also might attempt tie dye Mickey shirts for the 3 of us...my friend had it on her Pinterest and I stole it. She said they were not really hard, just time consuming and messy. Maybe she will come over and help me out??

I must also say that I already have acquired quite the summer and trip wardrobe for Miranda because I hit the fall clearance sales last year and got some great deals. But these First Trip shirts are just too cute to not get one right?

 

[STLMickeyMom]

Ooooooo, they are all cute! But, if I had to pick one, I'd pick the carriage one. It's different and so adorable!

 

[bugsmama11]

Ooooooo, they are all cute! But, if I had to pick one, I'd pick the carriage one. It's different and so adorable!

I really like that one too! I really need to see if it can be done on anything other than White, but if it can't then I for sure will be packing extra clothes!

I also found an adorable pillow case dress on Pinterest that is just fantastic, but again I'm not the crafty person...

http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/75/46/7b/75467baba0f1e5d676edd438d2a564c3.jpg

I'm just not sure how hot Miranda would be in it? This isn't available to order anymore and I know it's not an extremely hard pattern. I know she wouldn't have to wear it all day, but I'm thinking of cost vs. the actual wearing...

 

[STLMickeyMom]

That pillowcase dress is super cute! What if you switched it up a little so there wasn't so much white (hide any spills a little)? You can make that super easy and for not much if you don't get too elaborate and have to buy a lot of fabric for the bits and pieces. If you want, I can make something for you. I'm actually making some pillowcase dresses for someone else this weekend. I have some black to make a Mickey head and would just need about 3/4 yard of a main fabric (red polka dots?). No pressure--just throwing out the idea.

 

[Jackiemarie21]

Yay for Disney shirts! I like all of them, but the castle one is my favorite! Pillowcase dresses are really easy to make and don't take much fabric at all! The best part of a pillowcase dress is it can "grow" with your kiddo! You can wear it as a dress now, a jumper with a longsleeve shirt underneath in the fall/winter and when she grows too tall to wear it as a dress you can pair it will pants, shorts, leggins, etc and wear it as a top! I say go for that one!
Fun stuff!