Family Movie Night- Aladdin

We love family movie night around here. It's just a good chance to slow down, relax together and create some fun memories. Since we are such huge fans of the Mouse, it's usually a Disney movie. I always try to make something fun for the boys to eat, and I'm fortunate that they are really good eaters who will try lots of new things. Tonight we did Aladdin

I love this movie, I can remember watching it with my friends when I was not much older than the lost boys. Since its an Arabian movie, I wanted the food to be along the same theme. We spent the entire day at the local amusement park riding roller coasters and water slides so I knew I wasn't going to want to make anything too involved so I hit the olive bar at the grocery store for olives, stuffed grape leaves, hummus and pitas. And Of Course we had to throw some of Abu's stolen apples on the plate.

For dinner I got them some curly fries, they are twisted like Jafar :) I also used the rest of the pitas and stuffed them with meatballs (frozen...cause remember the roller coasters??)

Dessert is what I was most excited about. We made magic carpets! I spread some softened vanilla ice cream over graham crackers before we started dinner and tossed them in the freezer so the ice cream could harden.

And here is where all of the adult stomachs will turn... I let them use nerds and M&Ms and sour ropes to decorate their carpet. Then I let them have a little chocolate sauce.... I thought it was super gross. But the lost boys did not agree!

see ya real soon!

-C

Pardon our Pixie Dust

We're Updating!!

Spend a little time....save a little money

I have a client who is a dear friend of mine, she has been telling me about how she is paying for her upcoming family trip to Disney. It's so genius that I may just start paying for my own trips this way too! I asked her to write up her process for me to share on my blog. It's lengthy and not for everyone, but it could save you a good deal of money if you decide that it's a good option for you!

So, we’re all trying to Disney on the cheap (or as cheaply as can be done!), so I have found one way to help that I’d like to share. It takes some time, but it can usually save you on average 9-10% off your total cost, which for a family of five and a week at Disney, saved us about $300! That is a lot of moolah for a couple of steps! I'm thinking it will buy us a lot of these little guys

So, firstly, make sure your travel agent accepts Disney Entertainment Cards as payment, which if you book with Magical Vacations by Courtney will be absolutely no problem!

Then, go to www.Raise.com. They are a website that buys bulk gift cards from local retailers at a deep discount and passes some of that discount to their customers. Then, you are going to buy Target gift cards from them, and right now they have 5.8% off their Target cards, so that will be even more of a savings then we got, when we bought them at 4% off. Your gift cards will arrive via e-mail.

Next, if you do not have one, get a Target red card.. you don't have to get the credit card necessarily,  you can just get the simple red card that will save you 5% off your purchase. Now, take your gift cards from Raise and buy Disney Entertainment Cards from www.target.com with your red card, saving you an additional 5%! The fine print will say you cannot use a Target gift card to buy gift cards; however, Disney cards are considered “entertainment cards”, so they don’t count under this fine print.

After this, to be kind to Courtney , our travel agent, I combined our 39 (!) gift cards into 4. This will also help if you have to get some kind of refund from Disney, as they will only refund you the way you paid them (i.e. your Disney gift cards). It will also help because you will have an online record of your gift cards. This is a very easy process, but a little time consuming. It took me two hours, but if you consider I have three kids, 3, 5, and 7 that stay at home with me 24/7 was not too bad! =)

To combine your gift cards, you will go to www.disneygiftcard.com create an account, log your gift card numbers and security codes, then you will transfer the balances to one of the gift cards. I marked (with Sharpie) my primary card as Trip Payment #1 then transferred all I could ($1000.00) to that card, then I marked the next one as Trip Payment #2, etc. etc. You can only have five cards stored on this page. So, I kept my primary (Trip Payment) card on there, loaded four cards, transferred their balances, threw them away and deleted them off my account, then loaded four more, and repeated the process. Then, when the first trip payment card reached the maximum limit, $1000.00, I would delete it from the account and start all over with another Trip Payment Card. Then, when I had them all combined, I loaded my three trip payment cards back onto the site to have an electronic record of them.

Now, tips and tricks to making this work!

#1: This process takes a while, so don’t do it a couple of weeks before your trip.
There were a couple of times Target ran out of Disney gift cards, and we had to wait for them to be restocked. One time we waited for a couple of weeks, so I called my local Target to see if I could use the e-gift card and my red card to physically purchase Disney cards, and they assured me I could; however, they came back in stock online before I could even get up there. We don’t shop Target that often!

#2: Spread out buying your Disney Entertainment Cards from Target.
I have read that you can be flagged by Target by buying too many Disney Entertainment Cards at one time. We never were, but we bought three $100 cards about every three to five days, so that made it even more time consuming. I’m not sure what would happen if you were flagged by Target, but this is totally legit, so I’m sure you would just have to call customer service to have it removed.

#3: Carve out enough time to combine your Entertainment Cards
You can see it is a little lengthy process, and it can get confusing if you have several stacks of cards you are trying to log.

#4: Save those Entertainment Cards
Put them in your planning notebook, or give them to your travel agent, just in case anything should happen and you need to get a refund from Disney.

Hope this little tutorial has been helpful! Have a magical day!!

I hope that this has helped you, or has at least opened your eyes to the fact that there are all kinds of ways to make a Disney trip a reality for your family. All it takes is faith, trust, and some ninja budgeting skills! (Or someone with those skills to lay it all out for you) Special thanks to my Ninja Fairy Amanda.

See Ya real soon!

-C

Chocolate peanut butter grahams

So I love Goofy's candy company, and Main Street Bakery. They have these amazing cookies that I buy in bulk on each trip and freeze at home to hold me over until I get back to the happiest (and tastiest!) place on earth.

On my next trip I'm so excited to try the chocolate covered peanut butter graham sandwiches. In fact I'm so excited that I decided to try to recreate them here at home.  This treat is basically a graham cracker dipped in melted chocolate, then coated with peanut butter and dipped in chocolate again. I mean, how does it get better than that??

I started with some chocolate chips and butter in a double boiler

And lets be honest, once it got to this point it was tough not to just stick my head in the bowl!

The monkey man was kind enough to break my grahams in half for me so that I could keep stirring and start dipping

They weren't too pretty after the first dip but I thought I could probably fix that on the second coat (you will see that I was wrong....)

After this I divided them in half and did peanut butter for my monkey and almond butter for the little allergic bear.

One more dip in the bowl of melted chocolate and this was the finished product. Still not pretty....

but they were gone before that mattered!

T-shirt Round-up

The hubby and I just finished up an anniversary trip to Orlando. True to form I made our shirts. I had only planned to make shirts for the Magic Kingdom, but he is such a sport he wanted matching shirts for all four parks. Fortunately I had some Star Wars shirts that we just recycled from our last trip for Hollywood Studios

For Animal Kingdom we decided on Robin Hood. I love line art, partially because my drawing skills are limited, but also because its so unique to what most people are wearing in the parks. It also gives me room to put a phrase on the shirt without making it look too busy.

I wanted something "classic" for the Magic Kingdom so of course we went with Mickey and Minnie.

Our last day, which we were super excited about on our first trip without the lost boys, was to Epcot. We were excited about sampling a few of the snacks and drinks in the world showcase. No drinking all the way around the world for us....but we did hit a few good spots and we wanted shirts to commemorate that.

We had a great time, and look forward to making this trip a yearly tradition. Now it's time to get to work on our fall family trip shirts!

See ya real soon!