Our youngest daughter, Belle, was born a little over a year ago on August 1, 2018. Having 4 kids has taught me a lot of things and one of those things being that big birthday parties for babies and toddlers is overrated. Instead we decided to take Belle to the happiest place on earth for her very first birthday!
For this trip we stayed at Disney’s Contemporary Resort in the main tower with a theme park view. These rooms are so amazing! The view of Magic Kingdom is perfect! A lot of nights our kids are just too tired to stay until the fireworks so it’s no big deal for us to head back to the Contemporary and watch the fireworks from our room! Last minute we decided to add an extra night to our trip. Not wanting to spend the extra $700 on another room we decided to switch to a garden wing room at the co temporary instead which is only about $400. When we checked in Disney surprised us with some extra pixie dust though and told us we could stay in our theme park view room for our entire stay!
Fun fact before I start posting photos, Rhett fell about 4 days before we left for this trip and has a horrendous black eye in all these pictures! Memories made I guess!
We started out our first afternoon at Epcot. All the kiddos LOVE Frozen so the Frozen ride is an absolute must. We had dinner inside the pyramid at the Mexico Pavilion at San Angel Inn. The atmosphere is great, the view of the inside pyramid is very pretty, and the food is good. Nothing over the top special but definitely good!
Our first full day started out with breakfast at Chef Mickey’s before hopping on the bus to Animal Kingdom. We really love Chef Mickey’s and our little Belle has the best time with the classic Disney characters
When we got to AK our son Rhett’s Magic Band wasn’t working to get him into the park so we had to head over to guest services to get that sorted out before we could even enter the park. The cast member at guest services was so wonderful, he fixed Rhett’s magic band and gave us 5 extra fastpasses for our time. This ended up being so awesome because my husband, Andrew, and I got to use 2 of them to ride Flight of Passage for the first time. FOP is the Avatar ride that opened in Pandora a few years ago. It’s extremely popular, very hard to get fastpasses for, and always has a very long standby line. None of our kids meet the height requirement for it so we have never been able to do it. It just isn’t practical for us because we don’t want to waste a FASTPASS on something we can’t all ride and it would take too long to wait with the kids for the standby line. We bought thought FOP was amazing! It definitely lived up to the hype for me and I cannot wait for our kids to be tall enough for it!
We typically fly Southwest Airlines on our Disney trips but we had a lot of American Airline points to use up so we decided to fly with them this time. About 2 days before our trip I realized that American doesn’t allow you to gate check double strollers. We absolutely love our City Mini strollers and I definitely didn’t want them going through regular baggage so this was a huge gut punch to us. I decided to rent 2 city mini doubles from Kingdom Strollers and that was a wonderful experience! When Magical Express dropped us off at the Contemporary our strollers were waiting at Bell Services for us. At the end of our trip I simply dropped them back off at Bell Services for Kingdom Strollers to pick back up. It was such an easy process and I will now recommend it to anyone who doesn’t want to travel with their own stroller!
Tusker House in AK is one of our favorite character breakfast spots but we decided to try it for dinner on this trip. The character interaction was just as wonderful as it always is and the food was very good too but I still think we like it best for breakfast!
During our last Disney trip in February the twins weren’t quite tall enough to ride Slinky Dog Dash but they begged and begged to. This trip we were determined to let them ride it all their little hearts desired so we decided to do Early Morning Magic at Toy Story Land in Hollywood Studios. This is an extra cost special ticketed event. At 7am you are allowed to enter HS and head to toy story land where you can ride all the rides and meet all the characters all you want until the park opens at 9am. We were able to ride Slinky Dog multiple times (and could have much more but the little girls can’t ride yet), alien swirling saucers, toy story mania, and meet Jessie! They also serve free breakfast at Backlot Express which we had a few bites of before we got started because we already had reservations at Hollywood & Vine for 9am. Early Morning Magic was definitely worth the price for us and I would do it again in a heartbeat!
We’ve done Minnie’s Seasonal Dine at Hollywood & Vine many times but this was our first time to do the Disney Junior breakfast there. We couldn’t miss it once they changed the characters earlier in the year to Disney junior characters that our kids love! Now for breakfast they have Vampirina, Fancy Nancy, Doc McStuffins, and Roadster Racer Goofy! Food is typically buffet breakfast food which is good.
Since we started the day so early we decided to leave the park early and have dinner at Boma in Animal Kingdom Lodge. This was our first time to visit AKL. We enjoyed watching the animals in the Savanna and the property is beautiful. Our dinner at Boma was wonderful. The bread service was just as good as everyone raves about!
Happy 1st Birthday Belle! The next day of our trip was our little Belle’s first birthday so of course we spent it at Magic Kingdom! We started the day with an 8am pre park opening breakfast at Be Our Guest so we could get this adorable crowd free castle pic!
Belle spent her big day riding riding rides, eating, napping, and living her best life lol!
No princess birthday is complete without dinner at Cinderella’s Royal Table. I had also called ahead several months prior to reserve her a birthday cake for the occasion. It was a simple chocolate Mickey ears cake that read happy birthday and it was actually really really good!
The next morning we headed to Epcot for breakfast at Akershus. We have dined at Akershus before for lunch and didn’t care much for it, but the actual Belle princess is there so we felt like it was a must. I’m happy to report that breakfast there is actually very good and Belle was so adorable meeting Belle!
My oldest daughter, Lorelei is really really in love with Elsa, so a stop in to meet her is always a necessity!
Friendly Disney hack! Amazon stroller covers! These babies are only $11 on amazon and they are so perfect! It rains all the time in Florida during the summer. You can pretty much bet on at least one shower a day at Disney during the summer months so be prepared with stroller covers!
We spent the last few days of our trip at Magic Kingdom because for our kids ages, that is definitely the place to be! On this trip the kids are 3,3,2,1! The twins got to ride Seven Dwarves Mine Train for the first time and it was a huge hit!
If you need help planning a Disney trip please email me at kayla@teacuptravelco.com My services are free and I would love to help plan your magical vacation!
Raising Rowletts 