Surprise!

So I knew I wanted to take the kids to Disneyland a long time ago (like years ago). Larry and I talked about it and we decided next year was the year to do it. I was planning on keeping the whole thing a secret until the day we left and do the whole "you're not going to school today!" surprise. Unfortunately, I'm TERRIBLE at keeping secrets, especially when it's secrets I'm excited about. I also decided to invite my mom along to kind of help us keep the kids wrangled. Granted, Legoland was our little test vacation and it worked out really well, I thought it still might be nice to have an extra set of hands (especially if we have as many bathroom trips at Disney as we did in LL). So because I feel like I kept spilling the beans in small ways, I told Larry I think it might be best if we make it a Christmas surprise. 

I decided to get them backpacks, matching family vacation shirts, ear scrunchies (instead of the headbands), autograph books with pens, and neck pillows for the drive. I figured I'd put it all in a pile for them to find, somehow, and a scroll with the words "We Are Going To Disneyland!" they'd have to roll out.

Unfortunately, about 2 days before Christmas my mom mentioned going to Disneyland with us in front of Cara and Gwen. I had to totally play dumb and mom kind of caught on and stopped talking, but then she kept apologizing and I wanted to just be like "shhh!" haha. Luckily, I don't think they heard because they didn't say anything at all. I will admit that almost made me push back when we'd surprise them so that they didn't know, but I knew I really couldn't hold it in and needed to just have Christmas come already haha. I had to make the scroll sign completely last minute (and without a completely working printer, so the letters had to be in pink haha), but it worked out. 

So I told Larry that I wanted to give them the surprise after nap time, in the afternoon, so that they could enjoy their presents for a while and not get too overloaded with everything. I spent all night thinking of how I'd have them "discover" the goodies. After a while I thought a scavenger hunt would be fun and have the items be the last part and then I remembered they have a scavenger hunt-themed treasure hunt game and thought PERFECT! I put the scroll in the treasure box that came with the game and put that on top of their goodies that were covered in a blanket on our bed.

I ended up NOT waiting until the afternoon, mostly because my parents planned on coming over at that time and I didn't want it to interfere with that. So we let them play with new toys for a little bit and then I announced "hey! Why don't we play the treasure hunt game? I have an idea for an awesome treasure!" They were all immediately excited for it. I sent them downstairs to stay while I "hid" the clue cards.

About halfway through the game Gwen wanted to abandon ship and I had to make her finish haha. In her defense I did a lot of "go upstairs" clues then "go downstairs" clues and then "go back upstairs" clues (and so on) so they were sick of doing so many stairs, I think.

Finally, after about 10 clues, they made it to our room and saw the treasure box. I had Cara open it and try and unroll the sign to read. She kind of ripped it so I had to help a little. She read the sign out loud and then they all yelled out "today?!" I had to tell them it wouldn't be until after school was out and now Lucy keeps thinking we're going tomorrow because the girls don't have school (for winter break) right now haha.

While I'm bummed the surprise didn't work out EXACTLY like I wanted, I'm so glad the cat is out of the bag and we can finally talk about it and get excited about it (and boy are we EXCITED about it). I've been looking forward to this trip for so long that it still feels like it's not really happening quite yet,  but hopefully once we start booking things it'll be more real.

Wish us luck! I'm pretty hopeful it'll be one of our funnest vacations, but I've heard Disney can be hard with kids, so we'll see.