Welp! A Merry Thanksgiving, Happy Christmas, and Prosperous New Year to you all!

It has been quite a while since my last post, over a month to be exact. [Insert sad face here.] It is mostly due to the wonderful hustle and bustle of the holidays…but also a bit of the blame does need to go to my self-sabotaging tendencies to put things off until later. But it’s a new year, and a new me (sort of) and I am going to hold myself accountable! No more Scarlet O’Hara “fiddle dee-dee”s for me. Why put off for tomorrow what you can blog about today??

Now that I have that huge revelation out of the way, I wanted to let you know just how great our Christmas was! It was absolutely wonderful, and I’ll tell you why…

The Elrods went Disney for Christmas!!

Yay! Yes indeedy, we did! Although Tim and I have been to Disney more times than we could count, neither one of us had ever been at Christmas. Crazy, I know. So this September we decided that 2010 seemed like a perfect year to go. We started hightailing it down to Disney at 8:00pm on December 12^th and arrived somewhere around 3:00am on December 13^th.  (Driving through the night was quite gruesome for us, but lovely for our 6-month-old son. Pros and cons have yet to be weighed, but that is a different blog post altogether.) Because our trip was so fun-filled and action packed, I have decided to split our story into four posts…one for each day of our trip. I just didn’t want to skip any details. And lets face it, who has the patience to read a super long post?? This one is getting long enough as it is, so lets jump right in shall we??

DAY 1

The day we arrived we slept in a little later than usual to make up for the drive through the night and hung out at the town home that we were staying in. Although Tim and I are complete advocates for staying on property, we skipped that route this go around since we knew we wouldn’t be purchasing the meal plan. We wanted to be as thrifty as possible this trip. Lucky for us, an amazing family from our church whom we are blessed to know, allowed us to stay in the town home they own in Celebration.

Later that day we went to Disney’s Marketplace for a late lunch.
We ate at the new Pollo Campero that is located where the McDonalds used to be…right next to the Lego store. It was so good! Tim got the Signature Fried Chicken with black beans and rice, and I was feeling a little wild ‘n crazy, so I went for the chicken fingers. 😉 They were delicious! Had a bit of a kick and were super tasty when dipped in the house chipotle honey mustard. Mmmm!  You gotta try it!

Next, we walked around and shopped a bit, but not for long because I had one goal in mind. Getting Jack’s first ever picture with Santa! Oh, I was so excited! We had heard that you could get your picture with Santa in the Marketplace and that the wait was never long. Slightly skeptical about the waiting part, we decided it was worth the try. And boy was it! We seriously only waited 5 minutes…if that! Santa had his own little “Christmas Chalet” in the Marketplace, between TrenD and the Once Upon a Toy Store. It was stroller friendly and the cast members were super nice. Jack could really care less that he was sitting on Santa’s lap…but I found it just thrilling.  We retrieved our PhotoPass card (you were allowed to take pictures with your own camera for free as well), took it to the nearby PhotoPass center and within minutes had prints of our little man at his first visit to Santa Claus! Hooray!

The first Disney Christmas check-list goal was complete!

That night we went back to the town home and made dinner there. Around 7:00pm we bundled Jack up and walked down the street to see it snow in Celebration. It was pretty cool, but only a taste of what was to come. 😉

Hopefully this post was too! Come back soon for DAY 2…Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party!!