pockets full of sunshine: christmas at disney day 1

another reason i am so behind in posting is that we spent 10 days at the beginning of december in disney world. yes, disney world and christmas combined . . . could there be anything more magical??

like i have said before, we are those obnoxious people who love the holidays and truly believe "the best way to spread christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear." so, when my dad mentioned he would like to go back to disney world during the christmas season to experience christmas disney style, we jumped at the opportunity. then the planning began because there is a lot to do there at christmas. i definitely did more research than i did last time.

this time, we had experience on our side and we decided to take two days to drive down. (yes, we drive because there are too many people in this family to fly and we stay off site currently and by the time we paid for all that, we would have to stay home.) one friday, after school, we packed up and headed out . . . but not before the battery died in the beast (our expedition) and we had to replace it before backing out of the driveway. seriously. because we took two days to drive down, we were ready to hit the parks running on day one.

day one: sunday, hollywood studios

we started at muppets vision 3d. after watching the new muppets movie recently, the kids were really excited to go there. on our way out, we ran into these guys:

not literally as every character opportunity is meticulously scheduled by the master minds of disney who sell you an autograph book for $15 and a pen for $7 and then strategically place favorite characters all over the park causing you to wait in line for longer than you would for toy story mania so your smitten children can get their signature and a picture. genius, disney. genius.

miller made the girls have their picture taken separately as he did not want them in his picture with christmas phineas and ferb, or vineas and verb as he calls them.

after our wait, josh convinced me that star tours had a super short wait and he and miller should make a mad dash to ride before the line was too long. while we would hardly wait for anything all week, i agreed they should go ahead as i knew they would talk about it all day until they could cross it off the list. afterwards, miller got to make his own blue lightsaber just like luke skywalker. way cooler than buying a prefab one at target.

while they were at star tours, we went to the voyage of the little mermaid, but spencer fell asleep while we were waiting for the next show. she was sprawled out on my lap and nearly rolled off when the cold rain came down in the middle of the performance!

once the boys met back up with us, miller wanted to meet jake and since spencer was still sleeping, he was on his own.

then, we headed to a family favorite, beauty and the beast:live on stage. granted she was still a little groggy from her nap, but spencer was in awe. she sat like this through the entire performance-mouth agape, eyes glued to the stage, and occasionally you could hear little audible gasps when the beast was a little too fierce for her comfort.

we decided to finish our day at the studio backlot tour before eating dinner at abc commissary. we chose it for dinner because we knew we wanted to be close to the streets of america for the osborne family spectacle of lights, but we had no idea that we would be able to see the lights from our table. when the lights began, we could see people standing and looking, but not really moving. we had no idea they were looking at this: