Time to travel back in time again. It is now December 2005. A lot has happened since our Disneymoon in 2003. Later that year we bought a larger house and painted one of the rooms a nice pale green and jokingly called in our "family expansion room". We stopped preventing baby making soon after that thinking it would be months before we would get pregnant. Well 2 months later we were expecting. 6 weeks after that we found out it would be twins
. May of 2004 DS1 and DS2 joined our cast of characters. They were full term and healthy. Our family was complete.
Time marched on and my boys were 14 months old and we went on a family vacation to Atlanta. A month later we found out we were expecting
. Totally and utterly not expecting this one to come along (I mean an IUD is supposed to be as effective as the big V). After a rough start to the pregnancy, we got excited. I was 5 months pregnant in December of 2005 when we took our first family trip.
The cast for this trip is broken into 2 categories, the major players, and the minor players (people that were there but really seperate).
Major players: Myself (duh!), DH, DD (5.5yo), DS1 & DS2 (19months), MIL, SFIL, SBIL and his wife and their 2 kids we will call Cousin1 (6.5yo) and Cousin2 (4.5yo)
Minor players: BIL and his wife (aka SIL), DH aunt, one of her daughters (or it might have been the wife to one of her sons), and 3 of his aunt's grandkids (aged between 12-15) other than issues with meeting up times, these guys really didn't effect us all that much
Residence: 2 OKW 2 bedroom suites and a studio
Unlike most trips we actually traveled down on Sunday and checked straight into OKW. My DD was excited to be with her cousins so she stayed in their room that night along with MIL, SFIL, SBIL, his wife and obviously the cousins. We woke up Monday morning and got moving. This isn't an easy task with 19mo twins mind you. We fed them breakfast, made up lunches to take to the park and finally headed over to the room next door to get the rest of the family moving. They were already gone
! My SFIL had taken my DD along with the rest of that room (sans MIL) to Magic Kingdom already. I missed my baby girls first look down Main Street at Cinderella's Castle
. That is a moment that will never be recreated. By the time we finally caught up with them they had already done It's A Small World, Dumbo, and the Teacups. I was
. Remember I was 5 months pregnant at the time and the hormones probably didn't help.
I must back up a minute here. I failed to mention the days we were at Disney. We chose to go down December 18th-23rd as per my SFIL, the week before Christmas usually isn't too bad. Well the way Christmas happened to fall that year, most of the schools were out the whole week and Disney was way busier than he had anticipated. With so many school aged children in our group, it didn't really matter it was the time we would have had to go anyways. So now you know the crowds were pretty crazy for the whole trip. Not impossible, but definitely worse than I had thought it would be.
So amongst what seemed like thousands of people, I learned something about DS2, he doesn't do loud stuff. DS2 screamed at Disney World. Loudly. Constantly. He HATED it from the moment he was rolled into MK, until the moment he was rolled out. That first day we tried all sorts of things to get him to calm down, but by lunch time we admitted defeat. MIL took the boys back to the room. Luckily MIL and SFIL are DVC members so they are Disney frequent fliers, so she didn't mind too much.
SFIL was the leader for our group of people. He was in charge of telling us when and where we were going. SFIL travels commando style. He isn't used to traveling with young kids and pregnant women. We spent the entire trip running back and forth across the various parks grabbing fastpasses here, hopping in lines there, and staring at each other wondering when and where we were going to eat.
SFIL wings it for most meals when he is at Disney. They don't mind packing their own food in and eating CS for the most part. This wouldn't have been a big deal for me either. As a matter of fact it was what we planned. My DD wasn't too happy to be eating a PB&J sandwich while her cousins were snacking down on McDonalds. We did have 1 dining reservation while we were there. We went to Crystal Palace for lunch. Having pretty much given up on bringing the boys to the parks (we had tried several times at this point and each time resulted in DS2 screaming until he left), we left them at the resort with MIL. The remaining major characters all headed out to eat lunch with Pooh Bear and friends. We got to MK really early and decided instead of going into the park we would hop on the monorail and go over to GF and check out their Christmas decorations. This was a good in theory, but turned into a really bad idea. We got the the GF without a problem. Looked around and got back in line to get the monorail back to MK with plenty of time to spare. The monorail didn't come. Our time was slipping away quickly. No one could tell us what was going on, or how soon the monorail would be running again. We gave up and went downstairs to wait for a bus. We waited and waited and all the other buses came but not the one for MK. News flash, unless the monorail is down for a really long time, they don't run buses to MK from GF. We found that out the hard way. Back up to the monorail line. At this point it was nearly time for our reservation. One thing you will learn about me is that I HATE to be late for anything. By now the kids are bored and hungry, and I am tired and cranky. SFIL got on the phone to Disney Dining explained the situation and got the reservation held. The monorail FINALLY came. Turns out we should have hopped on the boat. We finally got to our reservation and had a good time there. I just don't think I can write well enough to explain the emotional turmoil all this was taking out on me.
I did manage to stop the taking of my DD to Disney without me by making her stay with us in our room. Her cousins came over and spent the night most of the time so we were all able to start the days about the same time. During all this we were trying to meet up with some of the minor characters and each meeting turned into a bigger and bigger headache. Some had phones that didn't work, some had phones that forgot chargers therefore died during the week, other "couldn't hear them". The older kids would inevitably be late stuck in a line somewhere or trying to figure out which bench on which bridge SFIL was referring to. Again with every missed time my stress level shot up.
There was one positive experience on this trip for me. DS2 liked Animal Kingdom. He really liked The Boneyard. He actually had a fun old time in there and would have gone up and down that little slide endlessly. That's all he liked of Disney though.
The last night we were there we went to Epcot to watch the fireworks. MIL had taken the boys to the resort earlier after DS2 screamed his bloody head off during our entire meal at the Biergarten (not a restaurant for babies that don't like noise) and just drove back in our van and parked at Boardwalk for afterwards. Guess what DS2 doesn't like fireworks either. Epcot had EMH's that night and DH decided to stay and try to ride Test Track as he hadn't made it on the ride this trip and he loves the ride. We took my boys and DD home while the poor cousins were kept out to really late night even though they were dragging. Leaving DH at the park, I hopped into the car and noticed it had a check engine light on. MIL mentioned that it had popped on a couple of days ago, she had just forgot to mention it
. I managed to get back to the resort an got DH on his walkie talkie. Now these walkie talkies wouldn't work around the stinkin' corner from each other, but I got him standing in the OKW parking lot to the entrance to Test Track
(SFIL estimates that to be about 5 or 6 miles). He didn't seem too concerned about the car and said he would check it out the next morning.
We got the van all loaded up and headed out. He noticed right away the van wasn't shifting like it should. It had put itself into its safe mode and would only travel in second gear which was only good to about 40 MPH. There was no way we could make it home going this speed. Realize this was Friday, December 23rd, 2 days before Christmas and our only guess was that the transmission was shot. This was my breaking point, I started to bawl. We stopped at some souvenir shop there on the strip and went to look for transmission shops in the phone book. A customer overheard us and told us that he runs a Dodge fleet of vans for his company and the only people they let touch their vans was the major Dodge dealership across town from where we were. We called them and they told us they would hook up the van to the machine to see what was wrong with it, but they probably wouldn't get to fixing it until the following week
. The whole caravan of cars traveled across town going 35-40 MPH the whole way and we were trying to figure out what we were going to do. We figured if we unloaded some stuff from some vehicles we could probably get enough seats open to get me and the kids home, but DH would be stranded until the car got fix. He would miss Christmas, and we couldn't really afford this major repair or to keep DH in Orlando indefinitely. We finally made it to the dealership to be told they wouldn't be looking at the car at all until Monday. I proceeded to
and we found the guy that we had talked to on the phone. He got the car in as promised. I wonder if that had something to do with the fact that there were about 20 people standing around at this point with us and I was obviously pregnant and bawling.
They hooked it up and found out it wasn't the transmission, but the transmission's computer and they actually had the part in stock and would only take a couple of hours to repair
. We ended up only spending $800 instead of the $3,000 I had envisioned. I nearly kissed the guy. They went ahead and fixed our car in front of the cars that had been dropped off. They figured those people weren't expecting their cars back before the next week anyways and we obviously weren't going anywhere without ours. Once we found out that the car would be fixed, most of our caravan headed home. Just the major characters hung out until it was fixed (just in case). We finally got on the road about 4pm. It was a very long day (did I mention we live 8hours away). To me this has and hopefully always will be my worst Disney vacation. I know most are probably thinking "that wasn't too bad," but to me the whole week was just bad, bad, bad.
Up next, either tie dying results, or our "Worst Disney day EVER!" (can you believe it wasn't in the trip from hell?)