Breakfast with THE Mouse!

We had to be up and moving pretty early this morning because of early reservations.  Given or late night, that was more difficult than I anticipated.  Definitely will have to take that into account next time around!  We had to take the bus to the Magic Kingdom and then catch the monorail to the Contemporary Resort where Chef Mickey's is.  

It was worth every 'early' minute.

Chef Mickey's is a character buffet with Goofy, Pluto, Donald, Minnie and The mouse, himself...Mickey.  Not only was the food the best we had eaten, by far, the girls LOVED the characters.  The smiles and giggles on their faces were truly priceless.  We will eat here every time we go. 

This clip is my favorite from our entire vacation.  It is bursting with joy and excitement.  Hannah's laugh is contagious.

Alyssa hugging Mickey!

Mickey kissing Hannah's hand.  She was in love.  Look at the huge smile on her face!

Mickey is a darn good chef!

Goofy may have been our favorite!  He was so funny and, well, 'goofy'!  The girls are still talking about him! 

Pluto...still don't know why he is a 'pet' and Goofy is a 'person'.  One of the great mysteries of Disney, I guess ;) He was cute anyway!

Donald Duck!!

Minnie! We have ears too!!

I think these were the biggest smiles Hannah gave me the whole week.  She absolutely loved meeting the princesses, but when she smiled with them it was different.  It was an I-am-in-the-presence-of-royalty-so-I-need-to-be-formal' smile.  So serious and composed.  Not the case here.  She grinned from ear to ear...literally ;)

After breakfast we headed to our first Disney water park, Typhoon Lagoon.  Oh how I wish we hadn't waited so long in the week to go!!  Disney sure knows how to keep you wrapped up in their magic while keeping you cool.  It was the perfect way to spend the day in the relentless heat and the girls had a blast!  All of the chair areas were covered in sand, just like a real beach. I never realized how much they loved playing in the sand until now...especially Alyssa.  They also had the biggest lazy river we have ever seen.  I don't even think we floated around the whole thing.  And, the wave pool wasn't like the run-of-the-mill water park pool.  Instead of constant, average sized waves, this one shot off one humungo wave every few minutes.  Seriously, it is about a 10 foot wall of water.  The girls didn't care for that.  Even on the beach-y entrance the strong current pulled us down.  We spent most of our time in the kids area where the had a whole water playground and pint-sized slides. 

It was a huge park and we had to lock our stuff in a locker, including the cameras.  But we did run back to get the Flip so we could take some videos of the girls on the raft ride.  They must have done it a zillion times! 

These stills below were taken right out of the videos...didn't know you could do that until I downloaded the videos onto my computer.  What a great feature!

After riding it a few times they figured out how to lean into the curves and spin their bodies to make them go faster!

When they started to get tired we headed to the hotel for showers and a little rest (although there were no naps taken) before venturing to Hollywood Studies. At Hollywood Studios we played on the 'Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!' playground for a little while before going to Pizza Planet for dinner.  Even though it took entirely too long to make, the gluten free pizza was actually pretty good.  Unfortunately, the girls were grumpy from being tired and hot so we didn't really get to enjoy being in 'Pizza Planet'.  

One of the things we had to do at Hollywood Studios was the Ariel show.  It was a 4-D live musical short of The Little Mermaid.  The girls loved it!  The other thing people raved about was the Toy Story Mani ride.  However, the FastPasses were all gone and it was a 90 minute stand-by wait.  With the girls getting tired and really not interested in riding we opted not to do it.  It is definitely on out 'next time' list! Instead we decided to see Woody and Buzz!  The girls weren't impressed.  In fact, they were the only characters (besides Hannah with the princes) we saw that they were afraid of.  We thought they were pretty cool...they didn't agree.  The picture pretty much speaks for itself.

That pretty much ended our fun.  Since they were tired and we had two really long days in a row we decided to skip Fantasmic, Hollywood Studio's nighttime show.  Just one more thing on our 'next time' list :)