disney day 3: a kingdom of wonder!

i had every intention of sharing the rest of our wonderful disney trip after christmas, but here we are almost to spring break, and i have still left you hanging on "disney day 2"! i am sure you have been checking back daily for the last four months to finish your vicarious disney vacation!! haha. so without further ado, here is day 3 of 4. :)


we spent the afternoon and evening of 2 days at the magic kingdom. after we'd planned our trip, i discovered that ABC was filming the annual disney christmas parade the same weekend that we were going to be at disney... i was bummed. i knew this would make the magic kingdom so much more packed that it would have been otherwise. but hey, we were getting to go to disney, so i decided to get over it and to go with the flow! we avoided most of the filming by visiting the animal kingdom in the morning, but it was still extremely crowded! for those of you who have been to disney, you understand the excitement of that first entrance into the magic kingdom, your first view of the grand castle... well, here was our first view...


i don't know what was more stunning... the sea of people or the tarps and canopies glistening in the sun! ha! once we saw the mayhem on main street, we opted to ride the train around the park to frontierland. our first ride was splash mountain, which really made me miss ethan. he loves singing "zippidee doo dah", and the brer animals were a whistlin' and a singin' it the whole time. i think i got a little teary-eyed, thinking about how much ethan would LOVE this ride... until the part when you get SOAKING WET! and i'm not talking about the big plunge at the end! we got wet at the very beginning! we couldn't stop laughing about how wet we got. it was definitely unexpected. (you're probably thinking, "ummm, you were on a ride called SPLASH mountain!".. yes, i know, but i was really thinking that we'd get wet at the end.... which we didn't.) anyway, here we are after the ride. ok, so i guess we didn't get SOAKING wet, but it was a lot of water. :)

i just couldn't believe how many people were at the magic kingdom on this day. i always imagined december (except christmas week) to be really slow and empty. but i guess everyone else thought this was the best time to go to disney too! :) it was also a saturday. in the future, we will not visit disney during parade filming or on a saturday!! below is the swarm of people that we saw coming toward us as a parade was ending. we decided it was best to turn back around and wait for the crowds to thin out!



the first day that we were at magic kingdom, we saw both the christmas parade and spectromagic, a special lights parade. very fun. this is probably the moment that i missed ethan the most...i was watching how excited all the kids around us were getting, and i seriously almost started crying in the middle of the disney christmas parade!! but i took plenty of pictures for ethan to see when he got home, as well as some video. and he had a ton of fun looking at all of that once we got home. :)









we knew that this would probably be the one and only trip to disney without our children for a long time, so we happily skipped most of fantasyland and mickey's toontown the first day. by our last day, we had gone through our list of "must-do's", so we walked through mickey's toontown for the fun of it. what a cute little setup for the little kids! we felt a little silly touring mickey and minnie's houses, but we did it anyway. :) our favorite part was mickey's kitchen renovation, since we were (are) in the middle of a similar project! my only concern was that mickey and minnie had separate houses.... aren't they married?! any disney-o-holics (nichele, susan, debbie...), please clear this up for me!


the tools in mickey's garage say "craftsmouse" instead of "craftsman".
brian got a big kick out of that!
we LOVED walking right by the stroller parking lots that were everywhere!!

our first day at disney, the magic kingdom was open until midnight, and i was BOUND AND DETERMINED to stay until midnight because we could! now keep in mind that i was fighting a cold and was really feeling awful, and we'd stayed at downtown disney entirely too late the night before after driving to disney, but we were STAYING TILL MIDNIGHT! well, about 10:30, we were feeling a little tired, but we knew we had a while to go...so we decided to get a funnel cake to wake us up! but we not only bought one funnel cake...we splurged and each got our own funnel cake the size of the magic kingdom!!!! 'cause we were on vacation! oh boy........ what were we thinking? we each ate half of ours and felt totally horrible about throwing the rest away, but what were we to do? get sick or waste funnel cake... so we opted for the healthier choice! i couldn't believe that i couldn't eat my whole funnel cake. i was quite disappointed in myself!! alrighty, a whole paragraph about funnel cakes is a bit over the edge... can you tell i'm on a diet now?! you can see my sweet husband gingerly eating the beauty that is a funnel cake. with the magic kingdom glistening behind us. it was a beautiful moment. much prettier than our camera could capture. hope would've done a much better job with this shot. that's it, hope, you're coming with us on our next trip to disney! :) and for the record, we left the park by 11:30 that night. we almost stuck it to the man.

the castle!
main street was decorated so beautifully for christmas!
the fireworks at the end of the night were spectacular,
and i hope the little girl whose head was blocking
my perfect view of the castle really enjoyed them! :)


so magic kingdom was fun, but i think it will be much more enchanting to share it with our excited children one day (there, debbie, i said it.... magic kingdom would have been more fun with our kids!). our favorite park is up next!