Get to know Jennifer, A New Contributor for My Dreams of Disney!

{Editor’s Note: Please welcome Jennifer, our newest My Dreams of Disney Contributor!  I am blessed to have so many enthusiastic writers want to help out on the site, you may know about Jennifer from the video that ran on our Facebook page earlier this week — so please welcome her!}

“When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.”  –Walt Disney

I am, by nature, a curious person.  I’m always looking for a new adventure, always searching for the “why” and the “how” of even the most mundane thing, always ready for an experience I’ve never had before.

And that’s where My Dreams of Disney comes in.  Hi, my name is Jennifer, and I am new around here!  I am so excited to be joining the wonderful writers of MDOD and to begin a new writing journey…okay, and I’m a little nervous!

Because I’m a “why” and “how” sort of gal, I thought it would be important to tell you why and how I came to be a Disney lover, and in turn, a contributor here.

Growing up, I was in love with Disney movies.  Our family was behind on technology, to say the least, and the best Christmas ever was when I got my very own VCR that lived in my very own room.  To go along with it, Santa brought me Beauty and the Beast on VHS.  I was in love.  She was me!  She lived on a farm, she loved to read, she was slightly kooky!  Okay, I never lived in an enchanted castle or fell in love with a beast, but my life had just started and there was plenty of time for that!  I began my collection of movies and dragged my mom to all the theater releases of all the films, even the really bad ones (A Kid in King Arthur’s Court, anyone??).

My parents tell me I had a brief visit to Walt Disney World when I was a kid, but I absolutely have no memory of it.

So when we began to have children and they adored anything Princess or Mickey, suggesting we go to WDW was like planning a dream I’d had since I could remember.

We, and by that I mean my husband Brandon and myself, have three wonderful children.

 

Julia is the oldest, and our first princess.  She’s organized and adventurous, and she keeps us in line (most of the time).  I let her plan a good majority of our vacations with only a little direction from me.  Restaurant choices are fully hers.

Brynn is our second daughter and middle child.  Her curly, wild hair matches her personality!  She’s brilliant and extremely funny and creative.  She also has high-functioning autism and dystonia, which does affect how we tour the parks (more on that in a later post).  In no way does that hold her back in any way, and you just can’t help but love her.

Sawyer is our youngest and he’s just so very…very…TWO!  He can be the most loving little guy, until he’s not.  Whoa.  At WDW, he’s an angel, and he recently had his first hair cut right there on Main Street, as all our kids have done.

We began our trips when Julia was three, and we’ve been four times so far.  Each year just gets better and better, and we are truly addicts.  Disney planning consumes us.  We are active on forums, we scour websites, we watch YouTube videos of other families…

And that brings us to how we arrived at My Dreams of Disney!  This year, we decided to make our very own Disney Trip Video.  We learned as we went along, but I really think it turned out wonderfully.  It’s fifteen minutes of pure joy.  Wanting to share with the people who had helped in planning, I sent it to Mike at MDOD, just hoping he’d view it and know that he helped create some of those smiles.  It turns out he’d make my smiles even bigger by sharing it on his Facebook page, then later asking me to post on the blog on a variety of topics.  Here is that infamous famous video link for all of you to see!  I hope you enjoy it.

And now I’ll let you in on a few of my WDW favorites and quirks:

• My favorite park is Epcot.
• My favorite park to watch my children enjoy is Magic Kingdom.
• We always have to go to Magic Kingdom on our first day of the trip, even if it’s too crowded to breathe.
• I am guilty of coordinating outfits for all five of us for every single day of the trip.  Luckily, my kids don’t notice and my husband doesn’t mind.
• My husband does water resource engineering as a regular job.  He does photography as a side gig.  That makes for fabulous photos, which you’ll most likely see here!
• My favorite ride is Soarin’.
• Brynn has a fascination with “it’s a small world.”  Kids on the spectrum tend to find something they like and stick with it.  We watch video ride-throughs, have the music on repeat, read the books, and play with the toys.  Her bedroom even has a mural of the entrance clock guy.  It’s serious.
• My kids sleep with stuffed Duffy bears, even though I wasn’t impressed with him when he was introduced (hello, moneymaker!).  You can’t help what they love.
• I’m organized down to every last detail of park planning and itineraries, but I can go with the flow, mostly because I have to.

That’s me in a nutshell.  I am thrilled to be able to share my Disney addiction with others and to make their trips magical, just as this site has already done for my family.

See ya real soon!

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