Sunshine State – Hive and Nest

First of all, this is my 300th post.  What in the world have I been blogging about?  Pretty much nothing. And you’ve been reading my nothings. Lucky you!

Secondly, my posting this week has been a bit erratic because I’ve been at the Land of a Million Dreams Nightmares. Otherwise known as Disneyworld. Normally I’m quite fond of the Magic Kingdom and Epcot (not so much the Animal Kingdom or that Hollywood place, but we won’t go there in this post.)  This week, however, is the busiest of the year here in Orlando.  Man, oh, man, you can’t even believe how crazy crowded this place has been.  I need to pause here and state that I’m a total crowd-hater.  I mean, everybody hates crowds.  But I really, really have major anxiety around crowds. So you can imagine how fun this has been for me (I complete lost it and went into hysterics–sobbing and snotty nose–in the lobby of the fancy restaurant in the Canada pavillion in Epcot. One of my finest moments, to be sure.) I’ve been taking advantage of the early entrance hour for Disney resort guests–7:00 am.  Which means that I have been getting my kids up at 5:45 every day. Yes, you read that correctly. We are on vacation and I’ve been waking my kids up at that hideous hour. Today we slept in til 6:00 and we paid the price. We got there 10 minutes after the park opened and there was already a 40 minute wait at Space Mountain.

By the time we left the park at 2:00 (I poop out with the babies after lunch every day and we all go back to the hotel for a little rest), we couldn’t even walk through Frontierland.  Baby steps were the best we could do.  I’m not exaggerating. So the moral of the story is this:

When you go to Disney, avoid holidays and summertime.  At all costs.  Pull your kids out of school, whatever.  It’s not like they’ll never learn how to multiply by 6’s if they miss that one week.

And get there early every day!  Just put the idea out of your head that Disney is a vacation. It’s not. It’s hard work. If you want to relax, go to the beach. Disney is all about getting up early, beating the crowds and doing your homework.  You have got to be ahead of the game.  Yeah.  Fun. (An example? We had to make dinner reservations for the entire trip last July. Six whole months ago. Does that sound like a fun, breezy, vacation-y thing to do? Notsomuch.)

I can’t get my laptop to connect to the wireless network here, so I won’t be able to upload my pictures it seems.  We’ll see if Mister will deem me worthy of his technical genius and work it out for me.