Whew, that was a long post title!!

I’ve been editing photos all week, while also fighting a slight cold we picked up the last day of our trip (I say that because symptoms didn’t show up until Sunday). I LOVE everything Disney, so of course I took over 1000 photos. I like to pare them down, and then color correct and crop the ones I like, which usually only gets me down to about 600 photos. I get attached.

Don’t worry though, I don’t plan on sharing all 600 photos here on the blog, that would be crazy. Be warned though, I will be sharing my super duper favorites from each park. Here goes…

Animal Kingdom is our least favorite park out of the four. It SEEMS hotter than the other parks every time we’ve gone, plus there really wasn’t much CT could do there. Because of the rules that small children had to sit in the middle of the car on the safari (and not be able to see much) that was out, and then all the other rides and such she’d be scared of. There was a really neat nature walk that had birds and gorillas, you can see a few photos above. CT DID enjoy that.

We wouldn’t have even tried Animal Kingdom out at all this trip if it wasn’t for the safari themed character dining I made reservations for. I was last minute making plans, so it was all that was available in CT’s age range. For those who don’t know, Character Dining at Disney Parks is when you have a sit down meal, served or buffet, in a large restaurant where a bunch of Disney characters are walking around. They guarantee each one will come to your table and see your child. They either talk to them, or in the case of characters with masks on, they hug them and then take a photo with your child. Oh and if you’re collecting autographs, like CT was, then they also do that.

CT was fine when we saw Donald outside the restaurant, as seen above , but when we finally sat down she wasn’t as thrilled. She ended up being scared of Goofy (who was super tall) and Mickey (We got a photo of him standing behind us, and it looks as if he’s with us, that was super nice of “him”). Apparently she only wanted to see Daisy. She freaked out about her actually.

All together I think we spent about two hours at Animal Kingdom. Maybe next time we go CT will be tall enough and old enough to enjoy more there. Maybe.

Another park we really didn’t have much to do at was Hollywood Studios. CT is 38″ tall and a lot of the rides there required her to be 40″s. CT loves the muppets, so of course we had to do the Muppets 3D show! Before this trip she hadn’t really experienced 3D in a theatre, or at all maybe. She loved it! She was reaching for all the things coming at you and all. It was really cute.

After that we tried out this little play area based on the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids. It was really neat looking with all the oversized pieces and all, but as a parent it was the most stressful place ever!!! There were these tunnels that only kids could fit in, and they had lots of forks in them, so you never knew where you kid was going to come out. Plus there were loads of people and it was super loud. I was so afraid we would lose CT somewhere in there, so after about 20 minutes we left. We just couldn’t handle it anymore.

All the other shows and such at Hollywood Studios had an hour or more wait time, and no fast pass, so we ended up leaving after about two hours.

We only had about 5.5 days in our trip to actually go to all the parks and see everything. Before leaving we thought that was plenty of time. We didn’t take into account the weather (which was bad the first two days) or the fact that this time around we had a little person with us, who doesn’t walk fast needs to stop and see everything. It was our first real trip as a family, we needed to be able to actually enjoy it all. That’s why we were being so picky with the parks. Next time, if there is a next time, we’ll add two extra days to our trip, that way we can enjoy more without rushing through it all.

Heads up, I’ll be sharing more vacation photos tomorrow. Oh and if you’re interested in seeing more photos from our trip, I’ve uploaded all of them to my Flickr account, there’s a lot, and I’m nowhere near done.