Day 825: The Crossword

First things first...Happy Easter everyone, even if I am writing this at almost 10 at night and Easter, for much of the world, is already over. Regardless, it's been a long day filled with Disney things, and you all know what today meant. That's right, Easter is when Mom decided Dad and the brother were finding out about our Disney Trip this June, meaning that they, as of now, finally know about this extra vacation that's thrown in to celebrate my parents' anniversary. 

Now...after all my talk over the past month and a half or so about this trip and how to tell them about it, I'm sure you're wondering how it all worked out. After a long period of time trying to figure out how to surprise them while kind of making them work for it, I came up with a crossword puzzle for them to figure out, which looked something like the following. Actually that's the crossword...it looks exactly like the following. 

This isn't the complete one, as the ones they worked on today also had specific letters boxed in that, when they unscrambled them, read "Walt Disney World June Sixth-Tenth." It took them what felt like an eternity to get all the answers...although they probably would have finished faster if they actually worked together instead of just sitting and copying off of one another every time one of them figured out a word. With a little help from me, it didn't take long to unscramble the letters though, and then the secret was out. 

Now, maybe they could have bee a little more excited about the whole thing. If it had been me I probably would have cried, although they are guys, so they probably wanted to appear more masculine or something. Either way, the crossword worked great, especially since some of the clues and words definitely had to do with the trip itself, such as "The Iron Spike Room," which led to "Wilderness Lodge," the resort at which we're staying. 

Other than that, my cousin made me this lovely present, which will have a place of honor in my bedroom at home since I unfortunately don't have that perfect place for it in my dorm room right now. Next year, on the other hand, I might be able to fit it in. Either way, I love it, and it's definitely just another way Disney appeared in my Easter Celebrations today! 

That all being said, I hope you had a lovely Easter! I'll see you all tomorrow! 

Have a magical day!

Day 818: The Big Surprise

We all love a good surprise, or at least most of us do. When it comes to Disney Trips, however, I've only really been surprised by one once: the day I found out my High School Band was headed to Walt Disney World for a performance and a workshop. I do, however, love watching surprises on YouTube where parents surprise their kids with a trip to Disneyland or Walt Disney World. I've talked about them before, and really, there are some creative ways of telling your family members about the trip, but trying to come up with those creative ways is a lot harder than it looks.

Then again...I'm also not surprising a couple of kids.

My mom and I, along with many of my friends and half the world at this point, have been carefully treading our way around telling my Dad and my brother for months now. It's gotten pretty close here and there...today, for instance, my friend Ashley was texting me and when she laughed, my brother asked to see her phone. I quickly texted something for her to laugh at that my brother would think normal (AKA Colin O'Donoghue spam...just tons of pictures, one after the other). He did, and luckily it put him off of the idea for a while. Dad's a bit easier to get around since I don't see him as much, but I've definitely had a few moments where I almost slipped up, mostly thanks to the slides of old Disney we've been looking at just about every weekend.

But now there's less than a week left until they find out. Mom told me initially that she was going to tell them on Easter, and that's not very far away, so we kind of have to come up with a plan on how to tell them. But, being me, I don't really want to do it in a classical way. We're not spending Easter at our house, which means we're not planning the Easter Egg hunt, and that makes for some problems right off the bat, and throws out the idea of an Easter Egg scavenger hunt to tell them. So Mom and I have spent some time this afternoon trying to figure out what to do instead and to be completely honest...I still have no idea.

Well...I didn't have an idea until just now. The thing is, when you're trying to surprise someone who's not a kid, you have extra things to consider. You can't just put together pictures of random things because if we did that, they'd have it figured out in a few seconds. No, you want to prolong the angst and the surprise...so how do you do that?

Ultimately, it took a while, but after searching through list after list of ideas, I think I've come up with the perfect idea: a Crossword. Now, I'm not finished with it yet and to be completely honest, I literally just came up with this idea about three minutes ago, so I still have a lot of work to do the rest of this week to figure it out. However, I'm pretty sure this is gonna be great, and I'll get back to you in a week to tell you how it all went down!

Which leaves me with a question for all of you: How would you surprise your family with a trip to Disney? Also, let me know if you have any fun surprise stories!

Have a magical day!

(Note: This blog post was written on March 30 due to Midterms).

Day 796: Keeping the Secret

Once again, if you are my brother or my father, I instruct you to stop reading this post immediately. Just...stop. I promise it's nothing bad, but I'm not about to be the one to spill the beans.

The simple fact is this: keeping secrets is hard. Especially big secrets. Big secrets that definitely involve your Dad and brother and Disney World and your summer job prospects and basically your life in general because you're a Disney blogger and are excited. It's been a struggle.

You see, Mom and I have known about this extra trip for like a month now and we still have another half a month to go before the others find out, and with each passing day it's harder to keep the secret. I suppose it's pretty easy when I'm at school all the time, because I'm not around them and the people I am around already know, but when I'm at home, especially for spring break, things start to slip out. After all, I'm not used to being one of the only people in the loop on things like this. Normally we all know right away that we're going and then we're all excited and so on and so forth, but not this time. No, this time I must be quiet.

It is sort of humorous though, since basically the entire world knows we're going to WDW in June, except for two of the people who are going. As for me, I've almost slipped up majorly a few times. Yesterday I was talking to a friend from church camp about counseling for the summer (which unfortunately I can't because of another job prospect and trips such as the one in June) and I literally said "Actually we're going to Florid...I mean California over the summer." My brother questioned it momentarily but because I brushed it off as "I sometimes forget because I'm so used to saying Florida at this point," and then he dropped it.

The other night we were looking at slides, which I've gotten pretty good at wording my way around things, and it just so happened that we were looking at slides from Wilderness Lodge, which is where we're staying come June, and I'm sitting there like "Yeah, we should go over there sometime," "Maybe we should stay there in the future," and "You're right, we really should take some of these slides and see if we can do some "then and now" photos." Oh gosh are things going to come back to bite them in realization when they find out.

But perhaps the biggest, and easiest, thing to slip up on is my countdown. As you already know, I have a white boat easel that my friend from high school got me that proudly displays the amount of time left before my next Disney trip. Because it sits on my highest shelf and, let's be honest, I barely have enough time to blog every day, much less go through and update a countdown daily, I mark the number of months left, meaning I only have to update it once every month instead of every single day. Currently, the countdown looks like this:

The problem? Dad and Jonny are sometimes in my dorm room, so every time someone comes to pick me up I have to stop and think "alright, do I need to put this down so they can't see it?" It literally says flat out that we're going to Disney World, because it would make very little sense for me to put just Disneyland on there, as that trip isn't until after our Disney World trip. 

Of course, I'm not the only one who's almost slipped up. Ashley and my brother's friend Jacob both know as well and are carefully hiding and talking their way around the secret at school with him, throwing my brother further off the trail to the point where hopefully, at this point, we can keep this one in the bag for another half a month. 

To be completely honest though, Easter can't come soon enough. 

Have a magical day!

(Note: This blog post was written on March 16 due to Midterms).