Disney Advent Countdown

I started this Blog to chronicle my families 2012 trip to Walt Disney World. My mother and I have been many times and this will be my kids 5th time, so I struggled as to how to make this trip different from the others. I came up with a Disney countdown. Each month March-September I will be giving the kids (and possibly mom and I) a Disney vacation gift. During the month of October 1st-October 22nd (we leave the 23rd) I will be giving a daily gift. These gifts can be anything from a pack of gum, to a t-shirt, to a gift card. I plan on starting this on March 23rd, which will be 7 months from our leave date. I will blog each gift along with our subsequent vacation. Some of the gifts take a lot of preparation, but some are just buying something small. I have a file on my computer with each of my ideas and how I plan to accomplish them. I will try to give as much info as I can on where I got the items for each gift and the total cost to make/buy 4 of them.

Up first are the bags that I designed to hold our gifts. These were plain white bags from the Dollar Tree at 2/$1. The mickey heads I got from here: http://www.4shared.com/all-images/c-uKoPwt/Character_Mickey_Heads.html There are many to choose from but some of them I couldn't edit in the program on my computer (Picasa) so I ended up using the basic Minnie for girls and the basic Mickey for boys. Using Picasa I added our names and the year in a Walt Disney font that I already had. I printed all of them in a 4x6 size on Post-It brand Matte photo paper that I also already had. I cut around the head and peeled the back off and stuck it on the bag. I will reuse these bags throughout the Disney countdown. Total for this is $2.

Now my plan is to acquire cheap little things for the gifts along the way as to not spend a large amount on things right before I leave for vacation AND to give the kids something to look forward to each month.  I am trying to keep as much as I can a secret from the children. I have already told them that they will not find out what resort we are staying at until 10/22 and what restaurants we are eating at (which is very important to them) until 10/21. Those will be those days "gifts." I will blog with each months gift and pictures to go along with it.