Disney Trip for Large Families

Once upon a time, I heard what I thought might have been the worst idea anyone had ever had: my mother and father in law wanted to take us to Disney World. (I wrote this post and let it sit for a long time, just now finishing - sorry)

You might think I am exaggerating. I'm not. I was a nervous wreck. The potential for disaster seemed epic. I scoured the entire world wide web for pointers on how to pull it off. But alas! All the sites purporting to give advice on how to take a large family to Disney were written for families with, you know, 4 kids. No one had much to say that would really help me.

So...here it is. The definitive work on how to take a mega family to Disney. At last.
(not really a how to, more like how not to)

Lodgings:
We live more-than-a-day's-drive from Disney. What we did for the journey to and from the land of happiness was get 3 hotel rooms, put the 5 oldest kids in the room nearest one of our rooms, and split the small people and parents between the other two rooms. The hotel rooms came with breakfast and we ate all their food, at first sending out small hunting parties, but eventually descending on the dining room and filling it completely. My sister-in-law travels for a living and had a bajillion hotel points that we happily consumed for all our lodging, which I highly recommend. If that were not an option, we simply would not have made the trip. When we were near Disney, we stayed in lovely 2-bedroom villas, with a full kitchen (I'll talk more about that later) and a washer and dryer!!! So 4 kids stayed with Grandma and Grandpa, 4 with Aunt-with-many-hotel-points-which-I-highly-recommend and her husband, and the other 5 with us, including 2 in packnplays.

Food:
We only ate out once, courtesy of Aunt-with-points, and the rest of the food was either brought or bought. We found an Aldi not too far from Disney and did some shopping there, but the hours were not conducive to our cram-it-all-in schedule, so we sadly did more shopping at Walmart than preferred, and made more frequent smaller trips there, continually hoping to make it to Aldi. A dream is a wish your heart makes, right? Lesson learned: Plan into the itinerary a half day for Dad to buy all the groceries.

I cooked for all the people (that was the deal - Grandparents bought the Disney tickets, Aunt-with-points provided hotels, I made food). I initially understood that I would provide our food, but it became apparent that I was actually providing all food - it worked out. For breakfast and supper, we ate at our Villas, avoiding cereal because the table seated 4 or something. Some days I sent the food to the other rooms, encouraging people to eat where they were. Other days we just all sat everywhere.

At Disney, a beautiful friend had told me about having mini meals and eating them in line. This works best when everyone is in the same line at the same time, but it was still good counsel. So I packed foods that could be handed out to children in a line. Frozen cups of regular yogurt, bagel sandwiches with salami and cream cheese, cheese and crackers (cut the cheese before you go) (I didn't), fruit, carrots, tortillas and hummus, stuff like that. Our extra big stroller purchased specifically for the trip was used half for food and half for exhausted children. We also put food on kids' backs in drawstring bags, that can be wadded up small when empty.

Activities:
I'll be honest. I don't think we nailed this part. The fast pass idea is not meant for big families. Nothing is. I suppose professional Disney Goers could probably make it work. But for a party of 19, trying to negotiate around the park away from crowds, planning where to be when, based on our Fast Pass reservations, was not practical. A ship this size does not turn on a dime. Some of our Fast Pass reservations did not actually speed up the process. If you go, do get a map and an expert and make Fast Pass reservations according to where you want to be when, WAY BEFORE YOU GO. Months before.

Also not completely helpful is the thing where one parent rides with kids and then the other parent rides.  So the idea is that everybody waits in line, Parent A rides with Child Who Is Big Enough For The Ride while Parent B takes care of The Baby. Then Parent B rides with Child Who Is Big. But when there are 10 kids big enough to ride and 3 who are not big/mature enough, it translates to Mom gets the shaft. Mom and Grandma took small people on ride meant for them, then Mom rides a few select rides with one lucky child while ALL THE OTHER PEOPLE WAIT. Yes, I pretty much walked right on, but it is a long walk, and they were still waiting.

In addition to the two days at Disney with the fam, we also paid the extra to go to Epcot (which I remembered fondly from when I was a youth) and the movie studios part of Disney - Universal something. When we went to Epcot, and finally made it to the nations part, there was a wine and food tasting event. Millions (ok, thousands) of adults with beverages. Insanity. Lesson learned: check for events and plan around if possible. Universal is mostly cool if you have seen the movies represented. We loved the Star Wars Jedi fighting lessons.

We also planned a beach day and a pool/chillax at the Villa day. Good plans. Naps in beds and air conditioning.

The sum of it for me was that, if I was willing to lay down my life, serve, prefer the people I love, only ride a few rides - it was a really good time. Way, way, way better than I was prepared for.

Best part: I didn't mention before that we do matching shirts when we do outings. It's a safety thing. Way easier to count children that way, easier for them to find and stay with the group, and helps strangers know who to point the stray child back to. Our shirts on one day were from a family reunion, a picture of my father in law's motorcycle with the words Billy's Gang. All day, everyone who worked at the park was asking, "Who's Billy?" And we would point to my father in law. He was smiling all day. And at the end of the day, as we left the park, there was a line of Disney staff, waving, smiling, applauding my father in law. It was worth it all.

Do kidney stones hurt more than labor?

(last year part 2)(leaving the hood)

While I was still physically and emotionally recovering from my miscarriage and d&c, I started having pain in my right "waist", as I call it. You know the place where your hand sits when you put your hands on your waist? Thumb in back, fingers in front? That's where it hurt. And that's kidney stone pain.

And my answer to whether kidney stones hurt worse than labor is yes. I feel that I cannot adequately describe kidney stone pain without cussing. It is Jesus-take-me-now pain.

I have had kidney stones pass before. And I have known for years that I have kidney stones hanging out in my kidneys, some too big to pass. But as long as I stay hydrated, they don't move and therefore, don't hurt.

But during the time I was in the hospital, waiting to see whether I needed a d&c, I was required to not have any food or drink, in case I needed surgery. And that was probably my undoing.

Since I hadn't had trouble for years, I didn't have a urologist. It took a few days to get in to one, and then to schedule a lithotripsy procedure, needed because this stone was 11 millimeters, too big to pass.

On the morning my husband and I left for the hospital, we discovered that the back of our garage, behind the big 15 packer van, was full of tiny black glass shards, and that one of the back windows was gone.

Hmmm, we said.

We spent the day (while waiting for prep and anesthesia, etc) pondering whether Chevy van windows ever just explode and shatter, was it really hot enough in the garage ... but when we came home, we looked around a little more and found tiny holes in the garage door. Bullet holes.

We have lived in the hood for 14 years. North city. The only white people on our block. We lived there through the Michael Brown shooting and response. Those have been our people. And we were theirs. One lady from our hood, Lena, used to come over and eat leftover pizza some mornings, with syrup. When someone asked her why she always came over to 'those white peoples' house', she paid us the compliment of a lifetime. "They not white. They niggas like us." *love*

Our time there was not without mishap. A bench stolen. Garage broken into multiple times. Ladder, bike, mower, broken weed wacker. Friend's car taken for a joy ride, but then abandoned, in our yard, still in gear, moving toward the house. (I ran, several months pregnant, jumped in and stopped the car - one of my more super moments)

We were blessed to have wonderful neighbors. Really great, loving, beautiful people. We also encountered folks with significant issues: druggies, homeless, a prostitute or 2, and a neighborhood drunk named Big Mike (not actually a big man), who called me Mom and said my husband and I were his best friends. He frequently came over needing a ride up the block to his house. Let's be clear - those are not problems unique to a certain skin color. But in our part of town, we had more than our share of those issues.

Still, we felt called to be there and honestly didn't ever see ourselves leaving. Even after one of my neighborhood girls was brutally murdered within site of our door, I didn't think we would ever move away.

Until the gunshots in the garage, my van window shot out, one of the bullets found in my baby's car seat. And we felt like God said, get ready to move. 

The Last Year, part 1

I think I could write a book about the last year. Year and a half actually. It started May 20, 2017, or a couple days earlier. On Monday of that week I had a doctor appointment and saw the beating heart of my 16th child. On Thursday, it wasn’t beating anymore. I named the baby Samuel Elias. I had felt the Lord say ‘This one belongs to me.’

Friday night we attended my second son’s graduation rehearsal. I remember smirking about going through the whole thing when we were going to hear it all the next day. Little did I know.

*** TMI warning ***

I’m sure I was spotting before we left the house. By the time my husband and I sat down in our appointed parent row, after carefully arranging our dozen pre-graduating offspring among the graduated kids and all our friends and relations, I was in trouble and I knew it. As the graduates solemnly processed down the aisle, I crawled across several other proud parents, thankful that the bench I had been sitting on was already red. I got to the bathroom and spent the graduation on the toilet trying to figure out how to manage crossing the stage with my husband and giving our son his diploma, and feverishly texting my female peops to try to get someone to come rinse out my skirt and bring me a diaper.

The diaper plus a stack of paper towels and a forgiving skirt got me through the ceremony and to the hospital, or at least to the hospital parking lot. The day ended with an emergency d&c.

There was grief, to be sure, but also the nearness of God and the empathy of so many friends who had walked that road before.