Okay, we have now settled on the how and the when of telling the girls about our trip. With help from . . . <sigh> . . . Pinterest, we have put together a brief scavenger hunt wherein the girls will follow a trail of clues, culminating in their hopefully finding the cache of Disney-related stuff that we have assembled. The "clues" are so ridiculously simple (e.g., "Look where we keep the silverware.") that if they can't follow the trail, we have been seriously overestimating the intelligence of these two little girls. Ultimately, they will discover the "surprise" by searching our guest bedroom.
As for the cache of items they will discover, we have created a souvenir savings jar for each of them as described in the prior post. Right now, each jars just has a princess sticker with their name on it, and we have several sheets of other Disney stickers they can use to really pimp these things up. We also have an autograph book for each of them to use to collect signatures from the Disney characters we come across in the various parks. Amanda already had one from her last visit, but it only has "Fairy Godmother's" (and, inexplicably, Jackson's) autograph, so it's almost new. Reagan is getting a brand new one (of a different design) which is much cheaper (I'm told) at the Disney store here than at the park itself. Finally, we created a framed 8x10 countdown poster which will track the number of days before we leave for the trip. Again, this was a Pinterest idea (or maybe Etsy, whatever the heck that is). Anyway, it's a simple sheet with the outline of Minnie Mouse's head and (in "Waltograph" font) the words "Days Until Disney!" We'll use a marker to count down the number of days inside Minnie's head.
The countdown poster idea led us to determine the when of disclosing the trip -- 100 days out. That was such a nice round number that it made sense to start there. And that day falls on . . . February 19, 2015! The girls don't know anything special is coming tomorrow, and we're going to have some logistical issues to work out to make it happen. Amanda and Susan have a Girl Scout activity at 5:30 tomorrow, and we're planning to do the scavenger hunt whenever that ends. But we'll need to place the clues first, and that might be kind of tricky since we probably won't be able to do it earlier in the day. I may just lock Reagan in a footlocker while the others are at Girl Scouts and do it myself. At any rate, our plan is for the girls to discover we are going on a Big Disney Trip literally moments before we say, "Off to bed!" Bedtime might be a little more challenging than usual tomorrow.
