Disney World: Our Resort

We had a great time a Disney World last week. It was a trip full of memories--some not so good. Like our stroller and all our belongings getting stolen. And when we lost my niece. Yeah, not so much fun. I'll talk about both later. The majority of the rest of the trip was so much fun though! We took a TON of pictures so I may have to break this up into multiple posts, depending on how long Hazel's nap lasts.

Oh, did I not mention that Hazel is currently napping in her crib?! (We sidecarred her crib to my side of the bed.)  This is the second time today. For a baby who has taken 99% of her naps in a carrier or on me this is huge, people! I'm actually having a bit of a hard time with it but Hazel is snoozing away and seems to be loving it.

Anyway, back to Disney.  We live only about 6.5 hours away from Lake Buena Vista so on Saturday the 2nd (my 29th birthday!) we started our drive south. It was a pretty uneventful drive and Hazel was so good. She doesn't seem to hate her car seat so much anymore! We stopped for gas and for fries and malts at a Steak N Shake (yum!) and arrived at our resort about an hour before my sister and brother were due to arrive.  We had the Disney music blasting and I was so excited when we saw this sign:



Hazel already posing.

This was our third trip to Disney World, our first being in 2009 shortly after Mike returned from Iraq. We stayed at the All Star Music Resort that trip and in November 2010 we stayed at the Polynesian and shared a room with my sister's family. This trip we stayed at a new value resort--Disney's Art of Animation. It was bright, fun and considering we didn't spend much time in our rooms at all--a great value.  AofA has mostly family suites that are Finding Nemo, Lion King or Cars themed but there is one section of standard hotel rooms that is Little Mermaid themed--this is where we stayed. My sister stayed in the Lion King Suites and my brother's family stayed one resort over in Pop.


Our room was pretty basic. It was a value resort, after all. Two double beds, one sink, a shower, tv, table and chairs and a dresser with three drawers and a perk--a fridge! We didn't have one of those when we stayed at All Star Music and it was a definite plus.

 

Our Little Mermaid themed room

View from bathroom

Ariel Shower Curtain
 

How awesome is this shower?

Curtain for bathroom privacy.

Another view of our room--there were three drawers on the left and the fridge is on the right.

Flippin' Fins Pool

 

 

 

And now for the Lion King section. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of my sister's suite but the outside area was really cool.

 

 

 

And CARS!

 

 I just realized I didn't walk around the Finding Nemo area too much. All I saw was The Big Blue Pool and the surrounding area. The pool was awesome though--did you know that you can hear music and the characters while swimming under water? So neat. We took Hazel swimming for the first time on our last day there. Unfortunately we were only in the water about 20 minutes because we had a dinner reservation to make but it was still a good time--lots of memories! :)

 



The food court, Landscape of Flavors, had a really great selection of foods and a lot of yummy things that you could buy with your DDP snack credits. One of the benefits of staying on site is Free Disney Transportation. This was the first trip we did not use Disney Transportation at all for our days in the parks. We did use it our first night there to get to Downtown Disney but we didn't have a ton of stuff with us and I just wore Hazel in the Ergo. We drove everywhere the rest of the week because it's a big hassle to take everything out of the stroller to collapse it to get on the buses.  It worked out fine and it was nice not having to stand on a crowded bus or wait in a long line at the end of the day. All in all, Art of Animation was a really nice value resort.  It didn't break the bank, it had really cute themes, the pool was awesome and the food choices were great. I would definitely stay there again.

 

I have a lot more stuff to post about our vacation and as I said earlier in this post I will have to do it in intervals. But if anyone has any questions relating to Disney World, dining, etc. I would love to try to answer them. I love to talk Disney!

 

Seven Months

Time is going by so quickly. At Hazel's six month check up she weighed 16lbs 8oz and measured 25.5" long. She's staying right on the 50th percentile curve. She's meeting all her milestones and growing just perfectly. She really is an easy going, chill baby. I'm so grateful for her every single day.

 

She's seven months old and Mike and I still can't believe she's all ours. We still marvel at every little thing she does and joke about how we'd rather spend Friday nights watching her play on the floor than go out. I can not tell you how much we love this baby girl. She's currently sitting in my laugh and giggling at the pictures of herself--precious!

 

I sit up without assistance and am rolling all over the place. I love peek a boo and when Mommy and Daddy sing to me. I LOVE my Jumperoo and am starting to realize that crying gets mom and dad's attention--I've started to pout. I'm reaching out for Mommy and Daddy when I want them now too. Mommy's milk is still my favorite but I love all kinds of foods too--mango is the best. I even say, "Mah" when I want mommy.



I am such a happy baby!

 

This Never Gets Old.

I've talked before about Hazel's love of bouncing. I blame it on all the time I spent on my birth ball before she was born.

Well, here's some proof of my crazy girl's love of bouncing. This never gets old.


And one of playing one of her favorites--"Super Hazel" with Daddy. <3

Have I mentioned that we love being parents?

8 Days Until Disney World!

We are heading  to Walt Disney World in eight days! I have been dreaming of this, taking  our baby there, since I was struggling to get pregnant. I know Hazel is  way too young to remember anything but WE will. <3

Disney is very special to us. Mike actually proposed to me at Disneyland in 2003. So, yeah...we are very excited to take our baby girl, our dream come true. We will be going with my sister's family from Ohio (they have 3 Princesses) and my brother and SIL will be flying down from Seattle with the twins. We will be there a week and will celebrate my 29h birthday and my brother's 40th. We will be staying at Art of Animation and doing lots of character meals. I'm so excited!

I have been busy sewing!

Mickey outfit for Arthur

Little Mermaid dress

That's a lot of polka dots.

What is Normal Sleep?

I see so many parents in real life and the blogging world stress and drive themselves crazy because their babies don't sleep through the night by X month. Even the pediatrician at Hazel's four month appointment told me to let her fuss at night and that she no longer needed feedings throughout the night. I just gave them the old smile and nod because I know my baby and I know that she hasn't been nursing as much during the day because she's too busy exploring so she's making up for it by nursing more at night. This is one of the many reasons bedsharing is the right choice for our family--I can not even begin to imagine how tired I'd be if I had to get Hazel from a crib multiple times a night.

Recently, I became concerned with the amount of sleep she was getting. Was she sleeping enough? Too much? Why are her naps so short? Should she take more naps? It took me two days of worrying before I said, screw it. My baby is an individual  just like I am. Why should I expect her to fit into some doctor's book's sleep schedule? I went back to reading her cues and going with the flow and you know what? We are much happier.

 If your baby sleeps through the night then GREAT! Sleep. Woohoo! The thing is though--IT IS NORMAL FOR A BABY TO NOT SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT so don't worry if your baby is still waking at night.

I've made it very clear that I am against letting a baby cry it out. I shouldn't have to explain why. I understand that sometimes parents feel that they have no other choice and no matter what they their baby will just not sleep. Everyone around them is telling them that they're baby should be sleeping through the night and that you, "have to just let them cry or how else will they learn to go to sleep?" Of course only you, as the parent, can make the choice that best fits the needs of your family but I want to offer you some additional information that I've found helpful.

The No Cry Sleep Solution is a WONDERFUL book that offers solutions and suggestions on gently guiding your baby to sleep through the night and also getting them to sleep without the rocking, bouncing, nursing so many babies (and mommies!) grow accustomed to. 

Evolutionary Parentss recently written a couple different articles about normal infant sleep patterns that I've really enjoyed too! Here's an excerpt. (Not sure what is up with the formatting--I'll try to fix when I can get on my PC.)

Thought #4:  Night wakings are considered sleep disorders thus they must be bad.
Sadly you can read a lot about sleep “problems” like night wakings and nursing or rocking to sleep (see [1]) which serve to make parents feel anxious and nervous about their own behaviour surrounding a sleeping child.  But historically, this behaviour was never seen as anything but normal.  And it remains that way in cultures around the world and is actually normal in our own culture.  A reminder that a review of 90 traditional societies found that not in a single one are infants and parents separated for sleep or experience sleep training as we do it[4] and approximately 40% of children in our own culture regularly wake during the night for the first few years[1][9].  While some will argue that our society is not the same as a traditional one, that ignores the fact that infant biology and physiology are the same.  So if left to their own devices, infants seem to expect to be able to wake during the night, stay close to parents, and breastfeed at length (which means breastfeeding during the night too).  Folks – THAT is what is normal.  Not bad, normal.

Thought #5:  We have the privilege of living in a society that CAN worry about sleep and so we can do better for our children.

I actually think this is flat-out wrong.  I’ve seen children’s sleep referred to as a first-world problem but I would argue it’s a first-world screw-up.  We’ve over-analyzed it, for one, but we’ve also created a society that is lessamenable to sleep than traditional ones.  We’re not in any privileged position here, but rather a worse one.  And in turn, I don’t think we’re doing “better” for our kids.  I think we’re doing worse.

Beyond being normal, there are also reasons to believe that these night wakings can be beneficial to infants and even older children.  First, as hypothesized by James McKenna, night wakings may help prevent SIDS[10], they are necessary for cue-feeding given the size of an infant’s stomach[11], and may even be an evolutionary adaptation to ensure someone is close by and caring for the infant, ensuring his or her survival.  Yet sleep “experts” and some sleep researchers are so focused on the need for an infant to sleep through the night, they ignore the evidence that talks about the benefits of waking.  Second, night wakings are intricately related to breastfeeding on cue, which is the biological norm for infants and children, and thus if a child is waking or rousing to nurse (with breastfeeding’s ability to save lives[12]), they are actually getting something very positive from it.  Finally, for some children, sleep training creates problems down the line.  Parents report that their children at older ages fear sleeping, don’t feel safe, resist bedtime, etc. and many of these parents attribute it to their early sleep training providing anxiety surrounding sleep for their children.

As to the idea that we’re doing better… have you seen the rates of sleep problems in adults in our society?  We have over-the-counter sleep aides, prescription pills, sleep clinics, psychiatrists who specialize in sleep problems (and have thriving practices), pills that help you stay asleep, and the list goes on.  According to WebMD, “Sleep problems… are common among millions of Americans”.  According to the US National Sleep Foundation, 40 million Americans suffer from a chronic sleep disorder.  40 million.  If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d believe that we were intentionally screwing up sleep early to ensure that we have enough patients for doctors and pharmaceutical companies alike.  That would be the easy thing to think.  But I don’t actually believe that.

Doctors and “experts” have been telling parents to leave children to cry to learn to sleep for at least a couple generations, and yet this is what we have.  At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, if all this sleep training were really helping kids develop proper sleep habits, shouldn’t we have a society of great sleepers instead of the opposite?  So ditch the misguided thoughts, educate yourself on what normal infant behaviour is, and embrace the crazy that comes with being a parent.

Happy Valentine's Day

I'm the luckiest woman in the world. My Valentine calls me mommy.