Tuesday's Activities Include: walk, Dutch, holiday card, photos

I picked up this year's photos of the kids (and the family as a whole). They are great! I did that this morning, and on the way home I dropped the two three photo storyboards off to be framed and bought an 11x14 frame for that photo. I left the remaining photos and the new frame at home and headed out to my Dutch lesson. A. fed me a very tasty vegetable soup for lunch.

When I got home, I went for a walk with M.

After that, I worked on downloading from Disney and uploading the rest of the Disney photos. I did a lot of that last night, but forgot the resort photos. There are mislabeled photos (says princess X is actually princess Y) and unfortunately the photographer messed up with the Belle photos and we got someone else's photos with Belle. Oh well -- we'll be back in a while to get Aurora and Snow White so we will pick Belle up again then, when we have lunch at Restaurant Marrakesh.

I used one of the Park Fare photos for the holiday card. Unfortunately, the holiday card I had mostly set up back in September suffered from some sort of font update and that basically wiped out my project. I deleted it, found the correct card design, re-added the previous photos, added the new Park Fare photo, drastically reduced the text because I had a lot less space for it, fixed fonts and background colors, entered the return address on the enveloped and even remembered the promo code to get 60% off (this _never_ happens, I always forget promo codes). So yay, that's done, hopefully it will arrive as ordered and I will get it out in plenty of time for the holidays.

Catch up blogging / trip reports largely complete

I think I'm mostly done catching up on trip reports, but I will go in and re-edit if I think of something I meant to include but forgot.

A Few Remarks About Sit Down Restaurants at Theme Parks in Orlando

Particularly attentive readers may have noticed that I ate at a lot more table service restaurants on this trip than I usually do. I often don't even have table service for every evening meal on our trips to Florida, never mind lunch AND dinner.

Several factors drove this seemingly insane approach to touring. First, I had noticed that reservations tended to get the whole group back together, so we had more time to chat. Which my sister and I like, never mind what anyone else might or might not think. Second, I noticed that after sitting down for table service at lunch, I was a lot more refreshed than counter service plus perching at some tiny table outdoors (indoors, air conditioned, etc.). Third, even before my sister's shrimp / shellfish thing became apparent, I knew our group had acquired some additional food constraints (R.'s onion family Thing turns out to really be So Much Better when treated with respect than when ignored). I figured table service gave us our best shot at actually all avoiding suffering from allergy / intolerance consequences.

How did this turn out?

Well, we did get more time to chat. And it was genuinely fun checking out several new dining options (I really liked Jungle Navigation Canteen, even tho the menu is not favorable for my kids'). We did (once we figured out about the shrimp) have much better results from eating food that wasn't triggering allergies / intolerances -- and we ate less fried food, too, and got a lot more vegetables. I have since discovered a lot of the counter service restaurants have allergy menus (I knew some did -- more research online has turned out a lot more of these menus, so I can pre-plan more counter service meals to be successful AND I can pick ones with indoor seating, like Pecos Bill and Starlite Cafe). Unfortunately, if I feel rested after lunch, I'm not motivated to head back to the hotel and go down to the pool, which means sometime around 3 p.m. I'm dead on my feet and short on time to rest before the dinner reservation. So this is tricky. I'll probably be doing more table service in the future than I did in the past, but probably not quite as much as on this trip. And I'll probably talk to T. and R. a bit more about which meals they would like to opt out of, since the lost time kind of cramps their touring style, which is much more completist than mine. (My touring style is probably best characterized as, "I've already been on it a dozen times. It'll probably still be here next time. If the line is more than 10 minutes long, I'll do it on some future trip instead." Which translates into, I'll do new rides, and then A. and I collect princess photos and hang out in gift shops and maybe stop in on a couple shows. Which is not a bad thing at all.)