Candy coupons for Disney

Todays gift is a candy coupon for Disney. My kids like those sour candy powder tubes that are sold everywhere so the coupon is for a small one.

The envelopes I have made previously and reused, the coupons were made on Picasa and I have used the clip art before.

Total for this gift is $0 until I get to Disney.

Take Ponchos to Disney

Yes, Walt Disney World sells ponchos. Yes, they are cute with Mickey Mouse on them. Yes, you can reuse them. Yes, they are expensive. AND yes, EVERYONE will have the EXACT same poncho on when it rains.....except me and my group. We will have ponchos that we bought at Dollar Tree before we left for $1. One dollar gets you 2 ponchos, one clear and one yellow. The ones I bought are thinner than Disney's and might not be reusable but I am definitely OK with that.

These are similar to the Disney ones:

This one pictured is from amazon.com and is like the Disney ones. (I Googled "Disney World Poncho" and got tons of pictures but I didn't want to post someone elses pictures on my blog just to show you what they look like.)They are nice and heavy duty but can sell out quickly in a nice rain storm and once you wear them, it is hard to tell who is in your family. Picture this: you and your family decide to all wear your matching tie-dyed shirts so you will be able to find one another quickly, add some rain, these ponchos, and EVERYONE is now in your family. HAHA

This is what I bought:

Pretty standard Dollar Tree item. We purchase these like crazy and take them everywhere for trips. In July, we went to Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, TN (highly recommend) and it POURED rain, like I was SOAKED through, it looked like I jumped in a pool and then decided to go to a theme park, we had 2 of these ponchos left. Mammie got one and so did Eve. Xander and I suffered. So, for this trip everyone gets a 2 pack. This will be so much easier than someone suffering (mainly, ME). 

Total for this gift is $5. 

Coupons for Disney..Mini-golf and a planning folder

With only 8 days left, we are FINALLY in the home stretch and getting everything finalized.

I have finally booked our Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party tickets and I decided to just do Will Call pick up since our travel dates are so near. They now have a print at home option for specialty tickets but I prefer the hard plastic tickets to carry around and not pieces of paper. My kids like to keep them and hang them in their rooms as souvenirs when we get home. 

I have all of my travel documents and placed in my cute Minnie Mouse folder. This is the first year I have taken a folder. In years past I have put everything in a file folder to carry it but what is the fun in that? So, this year I found this cute Minnie folder at the Family Dollar for $.50. 

I added the labels to the front to include: the last names of everyone in our party (covered up, sorry), Disney Vacation 2012, the dates of our vacation, All-Star Sports Resort, and then mine and my mothers cell phone numbers (also covered). The Mickey head is saved on my computer and has been used several times, for several different things for this vacation and the countdown. I used software I already had on the computer to make the labels.

This is the inside of the folder. I have one of our cute luggage tags to attach to a bag still in there. On one side is our Disney travel documents and behind that is our MNSSHP confirmations. On the other side is all of our flight info, Garden Grocer info, and our car rental info. 

Our gift for today is another coupon. This is a coupon for Miniature golf at WDW. Xander asks every time if we can go mini-golfing but we never seem to have the time but this time we are going for sure. With Disney's travel documents you automatically get 1 round of mini-golf free for 1 person. Because we have 2 rooms, we get 2 coupons. This just leaves me 1 person to pay for and since Eve is the only child by Disney's standards, I will pay for her. The adults will not be playing, just taking pictures. 

I am reusing envelopes that I have made previously, I just change the number on the front. I LOVE that we are out of double digits :) The coupon is made the same as the one I explained about yesterday here. 

Total cost of today's gift is $0 today but I am guessing it will cost around $15 once I am at WDW. 

Coupons for Disney..Mickey ice cream bar

9 days left :) Today's gift is a coupon for a free Mickey Mouse ice cream bar. We love those ice cream bars and in the years past when my kids have asked for them I always answered with "you can have one if you use your snack credits" but not this year. I made these cute little coupons with my Picasa software. I downloaded the Disney/Mickey name tag here and used the Waltograph software on my computer to type the message. I then printed them on cardstock to make them durable. They turned out really cute. The plan with these is to have the child fork it over when they want their ice cream bar. Although, if they forget their coupon I won't say no.

The cost of today's gift is $0, at least until I get to WDW. 

10 days left and lots of things to do

We only have 10 days left until our vacation and we have lots of things to do. We are especially busy this weekend because my son has a soccer tournament on Saturday and Sunday about 85 miles away from our home so I am up early to do laundry, blog, get ready, and because my allergies are killing me today. I was on a field trip yesterday with my daughter to a battlefield/re-enactment and being outside in the woods all day has really taken its toll on my allergies today. Hopefully the Claritin kicks in soon.

Today is also the day we can do Disney's online check-in. I highly recommend this service. It is much quicker than regular check-in. Basically, you just confirm your name, phone number, and credit card for either room charges and/or to use for a credit card on your key to the world card. Once this is all confirmed all  you have to do is go to a separate line at your resorts check-in area. The line will have signs that say online check-in above them. These lines are usually shorter than the regular line. All of your stuff is printed and ready to go, just show your drivers license to confirm who you are. No waiting to scan your credit card, no answering 20 questions, no super long lines, just a quick in and out. We were in and out of line last year in 10 minutes. It was late at night but it was still quicker than the year before when we arrived late at night and it took 30 minutes to check-in. This does not get your rooms ready faster, it just helps speed up the check-in process.

I made some new envelopes to use for some of my gifts. I have some papers to give the kids and also some different coupons (ice cream, mini-golf, etc.). I thought it would look nicer to use a cute envelope than to just throw a little piece of paper in that big gift bag. Don't worry, I saved the gift bags because there are some more gifts to come. 

To make these cute envelopes I did the following: First I needed an envelope. I just happened to have 3 plain, cream colored envelopes (I think they are still left over inside envelopes from my wedding 14.5 years ago), the size of these is 7x5. I had some Mickey Mouse scrapbook paper from some autograph books I made a few years ago. This paper was already cut to 6x6, I just trimmed the top and bottom so it would fit 5 inches. Next up is the Mickey head. I Googled "Mickey head outline" and searched until I found the right one. I saved it on my computer and printed it in the right size I was looking for. I cut the head out and then traced around it on black construction paper that I got from my kids art drawer, I glued the black head to the Mickey Mouse paper. As for the word "Days" it was typed and printed in the Waltograph font that I already have on my computer, it was glued to the Mickey head. I also typed some numbers in the Waltograph font and will tape those on daily. After all of this was put together, I glued it to the envelope. I'm sure this would look much cuter if someone had a Cricut but I do not and just used what I had. 

As for today's gift the kids are getting Pressed Penny papers. I found these papers at presscoins.com I used the "Current Listings with Short Descriptions". Back in April I gave the kids some quarters and pennies to use in the parks listed here and in May I gave them pouches to carry their pennies in here. These are nice checklists to carry in their backpacks so they can highlight the ones they want before we go and we will know exactly where to find them when we get there. There are 9 pages but if you photocopy 2 sided you can get away with only 5 pages. I will have the kids take only the pages they need, ex. if we are going to EPCOT there is no need to take the pages that list pennies from Animal Kingdom with us.   

Total cost of this gift is $0....I REALLY like free things :)

Craptastic gift :( but what are ya gonna do?

So, I was having a little trouble coming up with a gift for today. I have all of these fantastic gifts picked out and then kind of didn't know what else to do. The rest of my countdown has some cute things but I just couldn't come up with something else. I wanted to do $25 gift cards to Universal Studios but one of the points of this countdown is to do gifts that aren't super expensive and later down the road they are getting Disney gift cards. So, what is a girl to do?

My kids constantly use my Chap Stix because they get dry lips. So, I got them each their own. I bought the moisturizing kind with the highest SPF that I could find. I justified this gift by saying that it will protect their lips from the sun ;) I explained to my kids that I was out of ideas before they opened this gift so they were totally prepared for the lameness that was to follow. Needless to say they weren't too disappointed with the gift. My daughter thought it was crazy at first but realized that she would use it and liked it once she thought of that. My son, on the other hand, loved his right away.

I bought this at Walmart for $2.88 for the 3 pack. Nothing for adults today.

12 days....salty snacks

WARNING: todays blog is via email because I want to try mobile blogging.

This is going to be short and sweet.

Today's gift is salty snacks for the plane. Airlines seem to have went to pretzels as their snack and I'm not a pretzel fan so I thought I would go another route. Airports are super expensive with this kind of crap. Last year my son wanted beef jerky at the Newark airport and it was $10 for a little bag. Ridiculous!!!!

The sunflower seeds were 2 for $1 and the 3 bags of nuts were$.59 each, all from a convenience store.

Total for this countdown gift is $2.77.