Disney: The Other Parks
I think I have enough pictures to do like thirty posts on Disney. But for your sake, I'm combining all the other parks into just one.
After that first day at Magic Kingdom by ourselves, everyone else joined us at the house and we descended en masse to the other parks for the next few days! After a few stern talks with the kids about not just leaving with other adults without telling us, we all really enjoyed being together! We would often split into two or three groups depending on who wanted to do what and it was nice for the kids to have so many options. We also greatly enjoyed the child swap policy, which lets two adults wait with the baby and then once the rest of the group has ridden, you hand the baby off and those two people go through the fast lane!
The girls really enjoyed seeing all the different countries at Epcot, and we happened to be there during a flower event and that was really beautiful. There's a lot to learn at Epcot, which I'm not sure I expected, and the kids even still will rattle off facts they learned there or talk about how they saw something from a culture they learned about in history.
I was very skeptical about Animal Kingdom going in because I've been to a lot of zoos, but after a few hours (even including a power outage that resulted in us losing our spot in a line that we were just a few people away from the front of), I realized we were on a whole different scale. Animal Kingdom is like a zoo with an unlimited budget. We watched a bird show that was just like an old-fashioned skit, no fancy equipment or fire or lights, just people and birds, and I'm telling you I probably doubled my knowledge of birds just in those thirty minutes. We also watched the Lion King show and I do have to say, it might have been my favorite thing all week.
The other park is Hollywood Studios, and I enjoyed that more than I expected to too. I think with all the other parks it was cool, like we were in all these different realistic or magical places and you could imagine you were really there, but it always seemed kind of fake. But the Star Wars area was different somehow. I don't know if it was because it's newer or if it's because it's huge or if it's because the Star Wars universe is so big or if it's because the whole Star Wars idea was fake to begin with (my money is on that last factor), but it just felt so much more like I was really there. I also did grow up on Star Wars, so that didn't hurt. But I loved imagining that it was all real and I was on another planet! Plus. Wow. Rise of the Resistance. I mean. I just have no words. What a ride.
The other thing I haven't mentioned yet in this post is K. He thought Disney World was a party! All 24 hours of the day. Oh my goodness I thought I would die. The longest he slept at any point during the whole trip was two hours, and most nights it was more like one hour at a time. By the last night, he literally woke up every thirty minutes. There were days when I hadn't even been laying down in the bed long enough for my feet to stop hurting by the first time he woke up crying. I drank a lot of coffee. A. Lot. Of. Coffee. Actually, when I think back on it, I'm not even sure how I managed to stay upright on my feet and moving through each day. It was probably worth it for the big kids, but let's just say that ten years seems like about the right length of time between Disney trips to me!