Our last day at Disney! We headed down to Orlando on Thanksgiving Day and our last park day was the following Thursday. We actually decided to drive home first thing the next morning and check Kye into school (he was absent 4 days for this trip) so he’d be considered present 😉
Our final park day was at Hollywood Studios! We’ve also never spent an entire day at this park. Typically it’s a half day situation for us and we hit the highlights and head home. I LOVE that on this trip I felt like we got to EXPLORE a lot more at each park than normal. We left the trip all deciding we want to spend more time at AK and HS. Both parks have so much to offer and we really enjoyed our time at both! I was actually surprised by how much I LOVED Hollywood Studios! A lot of Disney people aren’t super happy with the park right now b/c they are doing so much work on it but I thought there was still plenty to do and that it was just a really fun vibe and very much our kinda style!
Last goodies!
Magic Kingdom JUST (as in last week) changed and now opens the gates roughly an hour prior to park opening and allows people to go on Main Street until the park officially opens. HS was the same and we had some time to kinda wait in order to make the mad dash to Toy Story Mania 😉
His pin got lots of attention!
Mr. Navigator
It was so fun at Pixar Place with all the characters in the street greeting guests as we arrived!
Toy Story Mania is one of Disney’s very best attractions (Zach and I LOVED the Cali version too) and it’s worth the mad dash to get there as quickly as possible at park opening!
Lucky number bahaha
Kye was a little annoyed that I beat him 😉
Duh. Zach beat everyone.
As soon as the ride ended the boys raced to Rock n’ Rollercoaster. We took our time exiting and loved getting to see the army man! I’ve never met them before and it was SO great. He was awesome with Britt!
My husband with the picture taking…I LOVE HIM 😉
Yes. We met a LOT of characters this week but after seeing Moana at Disney Springs Britt kept talking about meeting her. Honestly, it caused me some stress. I was worried about how we’d make it happen and told her it may not be possible. I recently paid to get access to Kenny The Pirate Character Finder and it came in SO HANDY.
We headed over to Moana’s location (currently back in One Man’s Dream) and literally waited less than 10 min. I know with the popularity of the movie that we will NOT be getting that lucky again!!! Not only was our wait short, but our experience with her was phenomenal. Britt is our little dancer and Moana approached our girls and asked them if they wanted to learn the Hula 🙂 It was ADORABLE!!!
There were SEVERAL Disney people in the room with us. Usually it’s just a character handler and a photographer but there were several others and all of them were very sweet and all about the girls and talking us up. When we left they offered us some really cool Moana activity books (and let Mrs Char take several for all her grand babies!). I feel like maybe they worked for the movie or to help promote it or something?
Favorite video of the trip…doing the hula with Moana! (I love that Tess was joining in too!)
We love Moana!
Hidden Mickey in the rocks beside her
We didn’t stop to look much in One Man’s Dream but it’s now on my Disney bucket list. I’m hoping Zach and I will get to sneak away for a trip just us for my birthday and want to make sure we take the time to walk through it together!
Checking out Buzz and Woody!
When you have Memory Maker why not take more pics?
We met up with the boys at The Great Movie Ride, which none of us had ever done before. They had LOVED Rockin Rollercoaster and Kye got quite the bit of attention for his pin…a Cast Member even hooked him up with some sort of Star Wars card.
I’ve heard recently that Disney didn’t extend the contract with Turner to do the ride so there is speculation that it’ll be redone. We all really enjoyed it though and def think it could be updated (they could easily do ALL Disney movies!) Our fav parts were Mary Poppins and Wizard of Oz!
Duh. Little Mermaid is a MUST
I’m always super impressed with the singing for the show! It was great!
Tess LOVES Mickey in a way that our others didn’t. We have several Mickey Mouse Clubhouse DVDS and if she gets to pick a movie she will ALWAYS pick Mickey. I was excited for her to get to see all the character at the Disney Jr Live on Stage show. It’s even fun for KYE who is almost 8! So if you have older kids, it’s still on my must do list 🙂 And who can resist BUBBLES?! Or Dancing?!?! Apparently Tess 😉
This was our first time visiting HS since they have added Star Wars…and it was the first time visiting where we are Star Wars fans. We LOVED what they have incorporated so far and cannot wait until the Star Wars section of the park is completed!
My favorite thing were the Storm Troopers. They were just roaming around and were so funny. I caught them inspecting all the strollers in stroller parking 😉
The Disney Chase character meeting for HS was to meet Kylo Ren. Zach and I met him at DCA and he was pretty dang creepy! I talked to the kids about it in advance and Kye was insisting he wanted to meet him. We told Britt she could stay with G-Mama and Tess. But when the time came she said she wanted to meet him too and she and Kye were precious about it. Kye was telling her all about him and how he will protect her 😉 Kylo does NOT sign autographs, or give hugs 😉 He made some comments about Kye’s shirt and how it was for the wrong side. I love that Kye didn’t flinch a bit! And, no, nothing about this picture was staged haha Britt was that freaked out 😉
Jawas!
They will trade items with guests and prefer shiny things 🙂 I didn’t want to do a lot of the Star Wars stuff on that day so we will have more we can do when we come for Kye’s birthday!
Kye specially said when we come for his birthday he wants to spend a LOT of time at the Launch Bay!
I love that smile! I’m so glad we decided to jump on the Star Wars bandwagon. Not only is it SUPER easy to find merchandise as gifts for him but there are so many positive lessons we can teach through the movies themes!
The boys headed to go ride Star Tours and I didn’t have a set plan for Britt. She said she wanted to meet Pluto (who we just happened to see when we excited Launch Bay) so she and I ran to the potty and GMama stood in line with Tess. When we got back to her they were next in line so it worked out perfectly! Pluto was our LAST character meeting on the trip (and I was down to only ONE signature page left too!)
Me and my big girl!
Star Tours!
We were so quick with our Pluto meeting that we had some down time so we got TREATS!!! G-Mama had been eyeing a couple prizes she wanted to surprise the kids with so she went to do her shopping while the girls and I snacked it up!
More Storm Trooper fun 😉
Doing her best Storm Trooper impressions
Once the guys were done we met them at Frozen Sing A Long. Just an FYI ice cream isn’t allowed in the theater. Kye had a frozen lemonade cup and we told him it was fine to just eat during the show. We knew he’d be careful and that it wasn’t really legit ice cream so it was fine. But he was NOT happy about it. He said he felt very uncomfortable about eating it and like he was breaking the rules. I love his strong moral compass!
Cookies were totally allowed though 😉
I had no expectations for the Frozen Sing Along. I just assumed it’d be a cute little stage show but yall it was laugh out loud funny!!! And the sing-a-long part was AMAZING. It totally transported me back to childhood when we’d watch the sing-a-long movies to all our favorite Disney songs 🙂
I took several videos: one, two, three and SNOW! (and one bonus snow one!)
(okay so I CRIED during the Let It Go part when it snowed! I swear yall that song just GETS ME. Plus Tess got super into it and it was just beyond precious!)
Outfits:
Britt’s top was Old Navy. On clearance when she was probably a year old and I just grabbed it b/c I knew she’d fit into it someday and it was like $1 haha I really loved her whole outfit for this day!
Kye’s outfit was also one of my favs for him of the trip. BB8 is his favorite. The shirt is Kohl’s and the hat is Amazon
Tess’s Ariel outfit is Britt’s from her first visit to Hollywood Studios
Zach’s shirt is Target
My shirt is Kohl’s
Back at the room Mrs Charlotte wanted to go ahead and hit the road. It was a LONG trip and its was tricky for me regarding Mrs Charlotte. We WANTED her to stay the whole time if she wanted to but we also didn’t want her to feel like she had to. I know not everyone loves Disney the way I do so while a week to me at the parks sounds like Heaven I don’t want to assume others feel the same way! It really all went SO SO well though! Mrs Charlotte is the type of person who will ALWAYS say she’s having fun and NEVER complain so it’s hard to know with her if she is truly enjoying herself but I think she had fun! I love that she was there with us for all the special moments and that she will have those same memories for us to remember together 🙂 She is such a great hands-on grandmother and we all adore her, but the kids especially fought over who got to ride with G-Mama (although Kye was pretty hardcore about keeping things even. He’d say “I road the last ride with Daddy so this time it’s Mommy’s turn etc!) 😉 I know that made her feel special! We are so, so blessed to have her in our lives and I always want her to know how appreciated she is! She decided to go ahead and drive back that afternoon. She debated driving back that night but I know I didn’t want her going to the park all day then driving 3 1/2 hours so I’m glad she went ahead and went on when she did! Much safer!!!
Before she left she gave the kids each a little special goody from G-Mama. I think it was PERFECT to give it to them at the end of the trip! We were FINALLY all feeling better so everyone was happy haha plus it was a special present to remember the trip by and they know it was from their G-Mama!
She really got the perfect gifts for each child! They LOVE their Moana stuff!
Best smile of the week from her!!!
Snack time…cookies from Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party!
We helped Mrs Charlotte get on the road then rested up for our last little bit of Disney fun that night!
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