WDW, part 2
After our first day of Epcot, we decided to pick up pizzas and come back to our condo complex to use the pool. The place we're staying in is really nice. Because its the off season we were able to get a 3 bdrm condo for super cheap. Its in a complex that's only about a 5 min drive to disney, the closest non disney property. In fact, we can see the evening fireworks from our living room! It has an enormous and gorgeous pool with a beach entry and a bit water slide. It also has one of those fountain areas which G loves! She made friends with another 2 yr old girl and they had a blast running from shoot to shoot for awhile.
The next day we went to Disney Hollywood Studios (DHS). G was originally supposed to wear a different oufit that day... her Toy Story one she'd worn before... but I must have forgotten it. Found the hairbow but no outfit. Don't worry (not that you would) but I brought an extra disney outfit along in case it was needed.

Anyway, before we left the house, I made up these quick little invites with stickers to show G what we'd be doing each day. Ex on the day we did Cinderella's Royal Table she had an invitation to the castle for breakfast with a Cindy sticker on it. For DHS day I made this little invite to the Disney Playhouse. G loved it! Each morning she'd run to the table to get her invite for the day.

With Handy Manny. G just loves Manny. I'm actually not much of a fan but oh well. G really loved the show. It was about 20 mins long. G danced around for about 19 mins of it!

With the Einsteins. I'm pretty sure she's never seen the show but that didn't stop her from enjoying the characters.

Waiting to go into the Toy Story Mania ride. Even though DHS was not at all crowded all fastpasses for the day were gone by 11:30 and the regular standby line was well over an hour by 10:30am. Luckily I'd done a bit of research on each of the parks and knew to head straight to the fastpass line at opening. Minimal wait for us.

Its a cute ride. You wear the 3d glasses and ride in little cars equipped with a gun type thing that you point at arcade targets and shoot by pulling a string.

More character sightings. This time with Jasmine and Alladin.

At the pick a pearl place in the Japan Pavillion. I'd planned for this by bringing along pearl cages shaped like Cinderella's coach and silver chains for both G and me. I was hoping to get an oyster with 2 pearls (twins) so we'd have a matching set but we ended up having to buy two separate oysters. G really liked it though and now we have our matching jewelry as a remembrance! Here's a pic of G's necklace.

The girls with our bling! You can tell how hot it is by how red my face is. It was a horribly humid day.

G was really looking forward to seeing the beast and we finally found him in the french pavillion.

With Mary Poppins

G had her first taste of soda. We ducked into the Coca Cola store where they have samples of unusual coke products from around the world. I gave G a little taste of the apple flavored one that they apparantly sell in Mexico. I was on the phone with disney lost and found at the time hoping maintenance had located my sunglasses that fell off my head and in between the cars while riding the Spaceship Earth ride 2 days before. They didn't find them. It was a long shot but I had my fingers crossed. I loved those sunglasses. G and Bobby had gotten them for me as a mother's day gift. Bummer.

My attempt at photographing Bobby to look like he's holding the big white ball. We tried it with 3 or 4 of the photopass photogs too so hopefully one of them will come out pretty good. Bobby really liked the idea of the shot.

And that ended the Disney portion of our vacation. It was really fun but incredibly exhausting. Five days straight in the parks is just a LOT of walking and its been super hot--in the low 90s and just as humid as can be although it only actually rained once. G has been an incredible little trooper. We've been hitting the parks at 9 0'clock rope drop and staying until about 4:30 or 5 each day. She's napped a bit in the stroller but more often than not she hasn't fallen alseep until we're in the car on the way to dinner (20-45 mins) and then that's it. She had one little fit today when she didn't get her way about something (lasted about 45 secs or so) and she has been getting a bit hyper at the end of the day but overall she's smiley and handling the heat better than us big kids. Casey has been able to maintain a calm demeanor better than the rest of us so kudos to him!

Tomorrow we drive to Tampa to catch the ship for the cruise! I probably won't be able to post at all due to high internet costs on the ship but I'll be taking lots of pix! I hope we get into all our ports ok because I'm excited about the excursions I have planned. We'll see :-)

Redeeming myself:
Yes, I know, I'm a bad blogger. Things have been so crazy the last several weeks that I haven't felt I had the time to blog. We've been busy having tons of fun though! I was off for a week during which G and I did lots of fun things together. If I have time I'll post about that later. But, here's the big news. The Crowell family is on vacation. First a week at Disney World and then next week a cruise.

I've taken literally hundreds of pix this week. Here are several of my fav's so far.

We started the week off with a character breakfast at the Disney Contemporary Resort. Chef Mickey is super fun. Funny story, we actually had reservations for another restaraunt. That morning we were running late and accidentally ended up going to the wrong hotel. When we walked in, I realized my mistake and my heart sunk. I originally had a reservation there but had changed it weeks ago. I took a chance, checked in, and luckily they still had my original reservation in their computer!! It was a great time. G loves the characters and had lots of fun.

I look a little overly happy in this picture but its the best one of my and G

Monday was Labor Day. The crowd levels at Disney were supposed to be high so we decided to go to Gatorland which was actually really neat. G liked it a lot. After a few hours though, the humidity really starts to get to us all.

With Casey and the birds.

In the aviary with G. You could buy popsicle sticks with some kind of bird feed stuck to them that the birds really went for. G liked the birds a lot. Sitting on a real gator with Daddy. You can't tell in this one too much but the gator's mouth is taped. G was really excited about doing this but by the time it was her turn she was getting tired and grouchy.

You can see in this one, with Casey, the tape on the gator's mouth.

Brett's turned out the best I think.

There are all these gated areas filled with gators. These are the baby ones. The older ones are huge! Some of them weighed over 1000 lbs and were 13 feet long! We fed them turkey dogs. Wish I would have remembered to pick some up at the store on our way in (I'd read that hint on tripadvisor) they charged $5 for 3 hotdogs thereOur first day at Disney. We went to Animal Kingdom. Very cool place (actually hotter than the hinges of Hades but you know what I mean, right? This was also Brett's 22nd birthday!!! Happy birthday baby boy. We did a character breakfast there too at the Tusker House restaurant. They brought Brett a cupcake with a candle and a button for him to wear that said "Today is my birthday" Brett wore it all day, somewhat begrudgingly, and was wished a "Happy Birthday" by dozens of cast members throughout the day. I thought it was cute, Brett found it tiresome after awhile.With my beautiful little girl!

The safari ride was good. There were a lot of animals and they were mostly very close. G really enjoyed it.

This is Devine. She's a character that looks like a plant. She walks around. Very hard to get a picture of due to crowds around her but I thought this was a good picture of her face.

Brett and Casey with the crazy guy, hahaha!

G had to sit on this elephant. There's a petting zoo there. As usualy, G could have hung out with the goats all day. It was wayyyy too hot for that so I dragged her away after about 10 mins. This is G giving the goat a kiss. The characters are very accessible. They are everywhere which makes G really happy.Next day, Magic Kingdom. It really feels like you're at Disneyland which I have been to hundreds of times. I grew up in Anaheim. But, G has never been so it was all new to her. She loved the rides and the characters. The lines were basically non-existent. I don't think we waited more than 5 mins to go on anything all day. The longest lines were for character visits with the fairies (1 hour) and Woody and Buzz. But, after having a pretty miserable experience at the Cinderella's Royal Table breakfast, I complained to the manager and he gave me a handful of special fastpasses called "no strings" which we could use for any attraction to go straight to the front of the line! Very handy for the fairies and Woody visits! Now I know how celebrities feel :-)

On Dumbo with daddy:

With the princesses at the castle. It really was miserable. They skipped us and then it took them forever to fix the problem and then they gave us a really crappy table after we'd missed half the show. The good thing was that G was completely oblivious to the fact that anything was wrong. She ate, eventually visited with the princesses and had a great time wearing her Cinderella princess outfit.

In front of the "Liberty Bell" in Liberty Square right across from the Hall of Presidents exhibit. I kind of forced the family to go see the presidents. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid at Disneyland (my mom used to force me to go too :-) It was interesting to see it with all the new presidents (including Obama front and center). It was near the end of the day, dark and cool. G fell asleep which was a relief since she foungt it for so long. Thanks to our super fastpasses, G was able to see woody and jessie. Fortunate for her because I would have never stood in the sun for an hour (the line went all the way around the Splash Mountain ride!!!)

Brett rode Alladin's Carpets with G. I don't think they have this ride at Disneyland but they might, I haven't been in a long time. Its just like Dumbo so G loved it! I think they actually may have ridden it twice in a row. There was no line so you could just stay on the rides sometimes.At Pixie Hollow. Again, we used our super fast pass to avoid the 60 minute wait time. G really liked the fairies... mommy did too!

The Monster Inc show was really cute! Its an interactive comedy thing where the animated monsters are up on the screen and they have actual conversations with the audience and make jokes. Very creative and funnier than I would have expected. Bobby ended up being chosen as the main person, out of the 100s of people in the audience, they featured so his face was shown up on the big screen about a half dozen times. Each time G would yell "there's daddy on TV!!

Day 4 was Epcot. Epcot was the park I was most looking forward to primarily because I could never get through my head what it was all about. So far its been my favorite because its so different from any other theme park I've been to. Epcot is huge so we decided to break it up into two days. On the first day we did the left side of the park --its broken up into east and west but for the life of my I have no idea what direction the "left" side is.

Test Track is really fun. We did rider swap but, again, there was no line. Brett and Casey ended up riding 4 times in a row without every getting out of the car! Twice with Bobby and then twice with me.

At the Epcot Character Spot. You wait in one line (one of the longest of our day at about 10 mins) and they have all the characters lined up so you can see them one after another! G was in heaven!

Bobby, G and I did another character meal at the Akershus in Norway. Fortunately this was a much better experience than the day before. G adored Belle and the food was really good. I love this picture of G with Belle. I think its just beautiful and of course G looked lovely in her Snow White tutu costume. With Snow White. I got the impression that not a lot of the girls dress up as Snowy. Everyone just raved about G's princess outfits. Even the photopass photogs were very complimentary which I thought was something considering they look at little girls in assorted princess dresses all day long. G felt very pretty wearing them.
By this point in time G had gotten very good at posing with the characters and it really shows in the quality of the pix which was nice for mommy!

With Ariel, not one of G's favorites.

In front of a viking statue in Norway outside the restaraunt. G just loves her brothers and they love her so much. This picture really captures that I think.

With Mulan in the China pavillion. G showed Mulan her shirt and told her "I was a baby in China." Mulan was so sweet to Georgie and spent about 5 mins talking and playing with her. G actually got a bit shy but she enjoyed it very much. I don't think the people waiting in line behind us were quite as thrilled by the amount of time Mulan spent with Georgie but I can tell you that I really appreciated it. No photopass photog with Mulan though, I guess she's not that popular. Too bad. I like that Mulan is a warrior princess... she's tough. She's actually my second favorite. I've always liked Belle, she's smart and likes to read!

G in front of the terra cotta warriors exhibit. It made me regret once again the fact that Bobby and I didn't make it to Xian when we were there. I can't wait to return to China with G someday.

More to come....