Great Wolf Lodge, Painting, and Disney Magic Bands

Hayden, Jasmine, and Emerson being silly

Our besties, the Barnes', came to stay with us last weekend.  We miss them so much!  I wish that we lived near them in Raleigh.  Anyway, the guys took the kids to Great Wolf Lodge on Saturday.  My sweet cousin works there and gave us free passes.  They had a blast in the waterpark while Natascha and I went to IKEA.  We had a fun time shopping but the boys were happy to have missed out, lol. 

 

At IKEA, I just couldn't resist buying the boys an easel and watercolor paints.  They have both been wanting to paint for a while now.  After the first 30 seconds of setting it up, I realized that I should have bought 2 easels because they fought over it immediately.  Ugh.  Lesson learned.

Check out our new Magic Bands from Disney!  We are so lucky.  There were 4 resort hotels chosen to participate in a test using these new devices and Yacht Club was one of them.  The testing phase is 8/2-8/25.  Normally, these bands are gray but you can customize them beforehand if you do so within a certain timeframe.  I love the cute box presentation!

So what is do these bands do?  Well, they are essentially the same thing as the Key to the World cards that you get when you check into a Disney resort.  They will open our room door, get us into the parks, be used to charge things to my credit card, and they are preloaded with 3 fastpass + times per day (4 fastpasses on the days that we go to the Magic Kingdom).  I picked out our fastpass + times recently and now we know what time we can do things like Space Mountain before we even leave home.  Considering that the parks are going to be at a high rate of occupancy during our trip, this will be invaluable in saving us time.  At first I thought it would be a pain in the butt scheduling everything so much but it worked right into my plans rather easily.  On most days, I have us riding the 3 biggest attractions in each park as soon as my schedule says we will be there.  All the fastpasses I have are back-to-back timewise.  In Hollywood Studios, that means that we will ride the biggest 3 rides (Tower of Terror, Rockin' Rollercoaster, and Toy Story Mania) in the morning and be done with those by lunchtime at the Sci-Fi Dine-In.  In Magic Kingdom, we will ride all the mountains (Space, Splash, and Big Thunder) and Dumbo first thing.  Why Dumbo?  Well, you have to do it once each trip.  You just have to.  Any Disney veteran knows that it has an incredibly slow line though and I hate waiting forever in that line.  Space Mountain is worth waiting for but Dumbo?  No way.