Mommy and Big Kids Disney Weekend – September 2019
We had originally planned to go to Disney over Labor Day but when Hurricane Dorian came through we decided to just stay home and avoid the craziness that bad weather can bring.
Zach was SO great to offer for me to go to Disney at some point in September in order to keep my goal going for visiting the parks once a month this calendar year!
The weekend following Labor Day our Disney House wasn’t booked so Zach suggested the big kids and I head down for the weekend and I was ALL ABOUT IT.
Yes, we LOVE going as a family but right now Zach is working super hard to get things done around the house and having a weekend at home was beneficial for him and Spear is not the easiest age for the parks so Zach was totally cool with keeping Spear at home!
I picked up the kids right at 2ish and we headed down!
They were SO PUMPED for the big kid weekend with Mommy – I love that my kids LOVE being with me 🙂 It makes my heart fill with joy and gratefulness!
My BIG plan for the weekend was to SHOP.
I love my community here and on Instagram and have really wanted to do more fun giveaways on Instagram. I did a poll and everyone loved the idea of giving away Disney merchandise so I was ready to LOAD UP on FUN STUFF!
We drove straight down to the Disney Outlet Warehouse and the kids wanted pizza for dinner so I found a CiCi’s near the outlets.
The struggle with the Orlando/Disney area is that you can be in a SUPER nice section and then BAM turn a corner and be in a ROUGH area.
The CiCi’s was a rough spot. I spent the whole meal on edge and nervous and had the kids stick really close to me.
Kye LIVES for a good buffet! And Tess? Well she’s a waste of buffet money haha! She was a big thumbs down for this meal.
After dinner we hit up the Disney Character Warehouse and had so much fun shopping and checking out the deals.
I didn’t get much there for my giveaways but did find SO MANY CUTE things for myself and the kids to wear to the parks!
There was a bit of a hassle in figuring out who would get to sleep with Mommy which night.
I know. I know. I’m such a COOL MOM for letting my kids sleep with me over the weekend.
Yall know I’m hardcore about sleep so my kids NEVER co-sleep and whenever they get to have a Mommy sleepover they basically think it’s the most amazing thing in the entire world (again, totally strokes that Mom Ego over here!).
The girls ended up deciding they were totally okay with Kye getting to sleep with me the first night and they’d sleep with me on night 2.
I loved every second of it! He wanted to snuggle and talk and wanted to show me all of his town stuff on Minecraft.
I have such a sweet boy! We had some great deeper big-kid kinda talks too about his fears and things on his heart.
It was well worth being super tired the next morning 😉
He woke up WAY earlier than the girls and we had some America’s Funniest Videos playing while I got ready for our EPIC day!
I totally let the kids lead when it came to our plans for the weekend.
My goal for the year is to visit A Disney PARK once each month, doesn’t matter which park or for how long etc.
They wanted to do MK and I was all about it!
Magic Kingdom really does have the most variety of options for us to do together and still have fun without the cool dad who rides the rides with us 😉
We had one of those days where we were the cut off for so many things. Like the monorail. We got up there and then the doors shut right in front of us!
Luckily it was a go with the flow kinda day and we just took our time and rolled with things as they came!
If yall follow our Disney adventures then you know MK is my favorite place and I love getting castle pics first thing in the morning.
We knocked em out and then headed over to another favorite first thing – Buzz!
But first…Purple Wall Pics! I don’t take these often enough…the castle has my heart so I tend to not force the wall too haha
Britt bought this candy apple stuffed animal from the character warehouse the night prior (only $5 but STILL she did NOT need another dang stuffed animal!). She wanted me to pose with it 😉
Kye killed us all with his Buzz score but Britt killed it with her concentration face 😉
I always park the stroller and have ’em “meet me at the red pole!”
I anticipated decent crowds. Yes it was the weekend after Labor Day which would typically be dead crowd-wise but with the hurricane situation the weekend prior I thought some people may have postponed their trips AND with the Halloween Party going Saturdays are even busier than normal at MK since it’s the only day of the weekend without a party night (which means shorter regular park hours).
We wanted to ride Buzz twice but decided to move on as I wanted to knock out bigger ticket items when the crowd was dead (I love me an 8 am opening because NO ONE comes that early haha!).
Tomorrowland Speedway has been closed for quite awhile with the construction for the new Tron ride being built.
It was back open and it is one of the worst lines to wait in (SO MUCH SUN) so I wanted to go ahead and ride it when the line was super short.
It is frustrating how badly this ride needs an update. I had someone DM me saying it HAS been updated but yall it needs a big overhaul. I don’t get why it’s not Cars themed. There is NOTHING Cars themed at WDW parks ride-wise so why not? It’d be SO EASY.
At least Tessie was good with me driving 😉
We headed over to Winnie The Pooh and debated which would annoy Daddy more…that Britt bought another stuffed animal or that we rode Winnie the Pooh. We all agreed – he’d be more annoyed by the stuffed animal than the ride 😉
People often ask if Disney loses it’s magic for me with us going so often and having an annual pass…the opposite is true.
It’s MORE magical because we can take our time to ENJOY the magical moments.
We don’t rush. We don’t wait in lines. We just have FUN!
The sword has been missing from the stone for awhile so we were pumped to see it back!
We all have our favs and Tess was hardcore about riding It’s a Small World while Britt was passionate about seeing Philarmagic.
Tessie was SO FUNNY during Philar. She met a little girl who was like 2.5 years old and was there for a first visit and she insisted that they were friends and wanted to sit next to her during the show and then tried to follow her afterwards too.
I think we weirded out the girl and her family haha!
We also had a Fastpass for Peter Pan…which the fact that there was an early morning Peter Pan Fastpass available like three days before we went down for the weekend was probably a pretty solid sign that crowds would be lower!
One of our favorite family memories was when Britt got to pull the sword out of the stone.
If yall ever get the chance to watch the little show at the sword in the stone – you should. It’s super cute!
We stopped to watch and YALL. I CRIED.
Part of the show is that they pull some big, strong dads up to try to pull out the sword and, shocker, they can’t do it.
A little boy was watching and yelled out “I can do it!” so they chose him to come up and YALL. I have chills just remembering his PRECIOUS face and excitement when he did it!
SO ADORABLE. I was more into it than his mom was. Just count it as another family that day to think that we’re weird haha.
Peter Pan was ALL over Fantasyland that day. I’m not a huge Peter fan. He’s pretty obnoxious and he annoyed me during the sword in the stone show b/c I didn’t like that he was taking away from the little boys MOMENT to SHINE.
It was funny though as Peter took a little girl over to his meet and greet area to see “all the people waiting to meet him” and NO ONE was in LINE. haha! See Peter, you ain’t that great 😉
We DID enjoy Peter coming over to the Hidden Pascal area and pointing out a few to us that we’ve never found before.
Did you know that NO ONE has found all the hidden Pascals?
We hit up Haunted Mansion and it was SO FUNNY how much like our ghosts Tess and I looked like in our ride picture!
Then we headed over toward pirates which yall there is just nothing quite like Haunted Mansion and Pirates. CLASSICS.
Kye brought along his Sorcerer’s of the Magic Kingdom cards and had to visit the portal by a great spot for lunch!
We took our time eating and just enjoying the chill mode 🙂
A random moth/butterfly was flying in the air above us and just suddenly fell to the ground and died. So weird.
In other
Clearly we had a BIG TALK but it was also HILARIOUS. I know as a kid I totally “smoked” candy cigarettes but I’ve never tried a real one before so I’m not really too worried about her pretzel habit leading to anything serious 😉
My one request for the day was to hit up Tiki Room.
We RARELY visit the Enchanted Tiki Room and I just LOVE the history behind it and love the memories made with my kids there – my Tiki Room crew!
First we used a Fastpass for magic carpets and it’s the ONE ride where Kye totally puts his foot down about always letting the girls sit with me and says “I AM RIDING WITH MOMMY” Period. It’s our ride!
We headed for the next portal in Kye’s game and learned that Tortuga Tavern is THE hang out for Sorcerer Collectors.
Yall. This game is INTENSE. I had NO CLUE how hardcore people are about it.
Card collecting. Trading. Combining cards to enhance the skills of them. It’s a LOT to learn and Cast Members don’t even know about it!
It’s like a secret club and it was neat meeting so many collectors. Some who were less than kind but many who were SUPER sweet and shared all sorts of tips with Kye.
We spent a good hour or so in there hanging out!
Jungle Cruise had too long of a line so we skipped it and Britt wanted to play in the water.
A fun thing about being a passholder…I don’t care one bit of they get soaked and their clothes aren’t “perfect” for our park days 🙂
I love seeing her JOY. Her smile makes me smile so big too! It’s contagious 🙂
Kye didn’t mind the break to do more card organizing haha
The kids all REALLY wanted to do Monsters Inc Laugh Floor this visit as we haven’t done it in a LONG time.
I had one of those days where I kept lucking out on fast passes which was nice. I’ve never actually used one for the Laugh Floor before and it basically just meant we got to be the first ones in the holding room!
We had discussed either watching the castle stage show (Friendship Fare) or the parade (Festival of Fantasy) and the kids all agreed they’d rather see the parade than stage show.
We took longer with the card trading than I’d planned on but it really ended up working out AWESOME as we just walked out of Tomorrowland and found the PERFECT parade watching spot right by the castle!
Our view was GREAT and we LOVED it!
We had a LOT of time before our dinner reservation at 5:30.
At that point it was only 2:30. And we were all ready to go and didn’t really have anything else we wanted to do.
So what do you do at MK when you don’t FEEL like doing anything?
You go to the Carousel of Progress – DUH.
NEVER a wait. A full 20ish minute long show IN AC and in comfortable chairs.
It’s perfection 🙂
We all love it (how can you NOT?!?!) and we all enjoyed the chance to just rest a bit.
On our way out we saw some Disney Ducks and ran into some random Disney friends on Main Street.
I also want to say IT WAS SO HOT. I thought it was hot in July but this weekend? 111 DEGREES YALL.
That walk to the car was TORTURE!
And I want to add that even though you never saw it in any of these pictures…I did have the single stroller with us. Britt and Kye walked but it’s just easier to push Tess AND it’s nice to have a place to hang everything!
I love Disney. I love big kid moments where we just go with the flow and have FUN doing whatever we feel like doing at the moment! It was SUCH a fun start to the super, mega long day (hint: we ended up spending 15 HOURS total at Disney that day!!!)
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