D is for DISNEYLAND!!

We're going to DISNEYLAND!!!

I might be more excited than Calvin. But that's only because I already know how awesome it's going to be. 

Calvin can't wait to go to "Mickey Mouse's House" and he's also really excited about going "Under the Sea" with the Little Mermaid. He hasn't seen the movie - way too scary! - but we sometimes watch just the song Under the Sea on YouTube because it's so fun and we have ocean animal musical instruments to play along :) Plus, Calvin loves ocean animals and all things water. 

Henry, obviously, has no idea what he's in for. I'm anticipating that some things will be hard for Henry, but as long as we can strap him in the Ergo for a little break from the bright sun and noisy crowd, I think he'll be OK. Now if we could just get an Ergo for James to give him a break from the crowd... ;) But one type of sensory play that Henry really, really loves is vestibular stimulation. That is a kind of sciency-way of saying he loves to spin and swing and bounce and roll. He loves activities that let his body do big movements. So I think the actual rides are going to be really fun for him. Spinning on the teacups, flying in circles with Dumbo... sounds like his cup of tea! James on the other hand... well, James might need some Dramamine. 

I found this amazing website called DLR (Disneyland Resort) Prep School with tons of really useful advice and information about travelling to Disneyland. The writer is a mom of 3 living in southern California and she has lots of experience with touring Disneyland with kids of all ages. I used her 6 steps for planning the trip and the most helpful things for me were her sample Disneyland and California Adventure trip itineraries. I used the ones for two days at Disney, one day at CA Adventure for toddlers and adapted them for our family. It was great to find a list of the toddler rides organized by area of the park, and helpful to have someone else's take on how to budget our time.

To get the boys excited, and to give them an idea of what to expect, we watched some YouTube videos of Disneyland rides and characters and I found this old Disneyland Fun Sing-Along movie which they love. I remember my little brother watching this on VHS about 20 years ago!

We also did the letter D for our Tot School Letter of the Week! We have continued to do some Tot School theme weeks since I last posted about it, though not every week. But we haven't done a Letter of the Week since we finished the letters of Calvin's name. This was partly because I started questioning whether I should have done lower case letters instead of capital letters. In the end I decided to go ahead and introduce the concept of lower case letters, since we see them in print all the time, but to focus on capital letters for Letter of the Week and for our letter recognition play.

So here are some ways we played around with the letter D

Words that start with D. Find the letter D.

Dot painting. This ended up being a bit of motor skill work for Calvin. He had to work hard to get the dot right on the D.

D for Dinosaur! Of course! These are foam stickers.

We did a little driving on "D Street" :) The delivery van delivered "donuts" (Cheerios) to Donald. Now that I look back at this, I feel like I should have written "Doughnut." *shrug*

And D is for Donuts!! We took a trip over to Krispy Kreme for some D-licious treats.

I did make a countdown paper chain like we did at Christmas, but we started it pretty late, so it's really short!

And in anticipation of our Disneyland vacay, for our toy rotation this week I included toys that I thought vaguely had to do with Disneyland.

Our Disney stuffies, of course!

We even built a swing set for Mickey and friends!

Our "Under the Sea" instruments

Next stop... the Happiest Place on Earth!

Have you done Disneyland with toddlers? Any tips/advice for us? I'm all ears!