Girls Take Disney Part II

June 12th-18th:  Pool Hopping!!

Saratoga Springs is my favorite Disney resort!! Especially if you are there in the HEAT of summer, because it has 4 AWESOME pools for little kids!!

Our room was closest to Paddock Pool, which is my absolute favorite pool for little bitties! It has a big pool with a Blakely's favorite water slide and zero entry. It also has a wet playground with lots of water features and two miniature water slides!

This was day 1 of the vacation, with KE knee walking... within 2 days of scraping her legs on the bottom of the pool, she was up and walking FULL TIME!!! Woot woot! 16 1/2 months old, and she is a WALKER!!!

As always, Blakely loves waterslides!

Katy Ellis is usually a Momma's girl, but these week she became obsessed with her GG! GG couldn't even leave the room without KE loosing it! She loves her GG!!

Blakely thinks she is hilarious when she gets into baby toys!! Crazy girl!!

Katy Ellis thought she was BIG STUFF this week!! She loved going down the waterslides OVER and OVER and OVER again!! She would crawl up the steps, walk across the platform and crawl into mine/GG's lap and off she would go!! She would giggle and scream the whole way down. LOVED IT!!

Our second favorite pool was the High Rocks Springs pool!! HUGE pool with a waterslide in the rocks, a mini-slide into the pool, a zero entry, a waterfall feature and a Donald Duck splash pad!

Love the pure joy on Blakely's face!! She loves "Disney World!"

KE loved the splash pad!

Love this era where hugging inanimate objects makes sense! HA!

Big WALKER with her GG!! Glued to her GG All. Week. Long. Love it!

Me and My Blakely girl!! Got to spend a lot of quality one-on-one time with my Blakely girl!!!

Blakely got her OWN cup for the first time this week, and she and KE became obsessed with "Blue Juice" (Blue Mtn PowerAde and A LOT of water).

She loves pool time, and despite 70+ SPF is getting a little bit brown!

3rd in the ranking would be the Grand Strand with a quiet oval pool and a fun horse race themed splash pad!

This chick!

Love the PURE JOY of childhood!!

In the evenings we would go over the High Rocks pool for a marshmallow roast!

We would go to the pool IMMEDIATLY afterwards, because this was a sticky situation!

Oh my!! That is one sticky, messy girl!

Our last night, we let the girls stay up until 9pm.

The pool at night is just magical.... not so hot, no sun (IE no sunblock!) and you can watch the sunset on the pond! One of my favorite times at the pool!

I think she likes it too!!

Girls Take Disney Part I

June 12th-18th: Girls ONLY Disney Trip

About 1 week before this trip, Mom texted me that she had gotten a week at a Disney resort... could I go??? Ummmm... YEAH! I quickly switches some days around at work, and started planning a girls only trip to Disney's Saratoga Springs Resort. About 1 day after we had booked the trip, GG sent me a picture of these adorable Minnie Mouse outfits for the girls.... GG is so quick and talented!!



To try to get the most out of our vacation, GG and I left Friday night after work to head to Florida. We pulled into a hotel in Jacksonville around 11pm. Our sweet girls had slept in the car on the way there, and then transitioned really well to sleeping in the hotel room. They are such great little travelers!!

At the beginning of the trip KE was still knee walking, but by the end of the trip....

 

Burned out on fast food, we ate at Tropical Smoothie Café on the way to Disney! What a delicious discovery!! We have one in town, and we will DEFINITLY be making this a new regular stop! Yum!

 

For this trip, we brought our bicycles! This was a brilliant idea and made it really easy and cool to get around!! Saratoga Springs is adjacent to Downtown Disney, so bicycles made it fun to make the trip over!

This was the first time on a bike for KE, and she LOVED it!! She didn't even mind wearing a helmet! Here she is blowing kisses during her bike ride!

There area a LOT of hills in the Midlands and KE was too little to bike ride, so we hadn't really done much biking since our move. As it had been a while, Blakely was ready for the next size helmet. I let her be the one to pick it out, and I think the one she chose is hilarious! It looks like a Kitty Cat! It even has ears and whiskers! Bahahahaha!!!

 

 

The girls loved to ride bikes to the other side of the resort to the Congress. They had an awesome playground that both girls loved!

KE steering the ship!

Monkey-see, Monkey-do! If I could pick a catch phrase for the week, this would be it! If Blakely did it, Katy Ellis was going to give it a try!! She is not going to be left behind!

Peek-a-boo!

This girl LOVES to be barefoot! If you take your eyes off her for a minute, the shoes are gone!!

GG helping Blakely on the rope ladder.

Because it was so close, we went to Downtown Disney almost every night for a little fun!

Two little monkeys!

"I am BIG!!"

I personally think these iced cookies are gross and hard as rocks, but.... Blakely always picks a princess cookie for her DD treat!

"Mom, why are you torturing us with more pictures?"

We went oven to Once Upon a Toy, and we couldn't even go in! The girls got so distracted by the bubble machine outside! Ha! We may have hung out for a while! ;-)

 

They were having such a good time... you know I HAD to get one to take home with us! The girls even got one for Banks and Walker too! A BIG, BIG hit!!

It was a super hot week in Orlando (over 100 every day), so what better way to cool down then an Icee?

Katy Ellis was a fan!

 

Blakely's favorite classic Disney character has always been Minnie Mouse, but this week she surprised me and switched to Pluto! She got so excited anytime she saw Pluto and went crazy kissing Pluto at Chef Mickey's!

Build-A-Dino in T-Rex Cafe

Blakely saw Aladdin for the first time this week, and she instantly fell in love with Jasmine and Raja. So when it came time to pick out her "Dino," she immediately picked out this saber tooth tiger which she dubbed Raja!!

Kissing Raja's heart before it gets put in!

Blakely takes this whole process VERY seriously!

"I'll push all the button's myself, Mom."

Meet Raja!! The newest member of the Monk family!!

Too hot to go into the Parks, but our Disney trip still has a LOT of magic too it!! Thank you for bringing us with you GG!! We love Disney World!!