*This is the second part of our post on tips for people planning their first trip to Walt Disney World. Read the first part here.

5) Use the Disney Mom Panel advice. Research the different hotels in your price range. The Port Orleans Riverside is not the same as the Port Orleans French Quarter. Take into account location and transportation hubs. The Polynesian, Grand Floridian, and Contemporary sit in prime locations, with water taxis, monorail, and bus service. You can walk from the Contemporary to one park. Animal Kingdom Lodge on the other hand has only bus service. Not necessarily a deal breaker, but something to consider when planning your days. Some resorts offer convenience and modern amenities while others focus on charm and immersion in themes.

6) Use the Key to the World. Having your room key as a charge card, fast pass, and park ticket all in one is tremendous. This conceivably allows you to leave everything else in the wall safe and just carry that and your I.D. We had a bunch of American Express and Visa gift cards [to use for out of pocket expenses], but keeping track of the different cards and their balances was a pain. Using the room key to cover all charges and then using the different gift cards to pay the final balance at the end was a great help. To illustrate how awesome the dining plan is again, the final bill for a 7 day stay was about $170. This was mostly from gratuities on the sit down meals, with a few souvenirs and adult beverages thrown in. The dining plan virtually guarantees you won't be buying [a lot of] food out of pocket.

Anyone else remember the commercial jingle?

We cashed in our credit card reward points for a pre-paid Visa and combined it with Christmas presents, some pre-paid Visas I won and one with a leftover balance from Tastemakers and took all them with us for our out of pocket expenses. Combined with the Disney gift cards we got from the Vacation Club presentation and we had about $700 to use (and came home with almost all of it). 

It took a few days for Phil to think of this, but we started charging everything to our room. Hot chocolate, the tips on our sit down meals, the hats and scarves we bought because it freezing. It was nice not to have to keep track of cash or the balances on the various cards. The key is this (and it's important!): you MUST settle those charges the night BEFORE you are to check out or they will automatically go onto the card you used to reserve the trip! 

We stopped into the hotel lobby on the way back from a late dinner and took care of it. The most money we spent out of pocket was in the airports on breakfasts and Starbucks. If you have any means of earning pre-paid cards, answering emails or taking surveys and buying cards with that money I highly suggest it.

7) Plan your trip carefully on the website. The website is very helpful, but there are some snags with it. Two [things] that bothered me the most were the itinerary function, and the initial booking function. You have to be very careful when booking your trip because there are several defaults in the system. 

When you pick your initial date, number of people, and hotel range, it will kick out a recommended package. This is when you can go in and change options around such as dining plan, room choice, and ticket options. Be careful, because when you select an option for one thing, it may effect other categories you didn't intend. 

For instance, the default ticket option gives you the park hopper and water park. If you select a dining plan, it resets that option to the base ticket, which is what comes with the dining plan. The itinerary function is just buggy. I had a hard time making and editing notes. I wanted to keep dining reservations there, but it was difficult, and didn't always display right. Also, the printout isn't as functional as it could be.

Hollywood Studios stunt show

8) Make dinner reservations. Early. If you don't have reservations when you start your trip, you aren't getting in to any restaurant during peak hours. Period. If you find yourself without reservations, your best bet is to hit the place right when it opens for lunch or dinner. If you try at noon or 6 without reservations you can forget it. The resort restaurants are less crowded then the park ones, so you may have better luck there.

This is definitely necessary but leaves little room for flexibility because reservations need to made at least 180 days before your trip! Say you're in Magic Kingdom waiting in a 90-minute line for Space Mountain. You have 6:00 reservations for dinner at Animal Kingdom. You have to be very aware of your time, factor in travel times around the park and be prepared to give up your fast passes.

If you're late, your reservation is gone. If you make a reservation plan on being in that park for the day. There were a few times we didn't want to leave where we were. We also had some rain that we didn't feel like venturing out into but didn't want to lose the chance to eat at the various place in the park (there's some awesome food at Disney!)

Phil originally had eight tips but I wanted to add one item.

9) Check, re-check and check the weather again. We had a freak cold because of the snow the east got. We were under dressed and not prepared. I was at the conference on the day it poured and Phil wasn't sure where to go to spend a rainy day. We didn't know there was a movie theater in Downtown Disney and we hadn't gone to Epcot yet and didn't know about Innoventions either. It's easy to kill about 2 hours there. The couches for tired parents are a welcome bonus. Have a back up plan for weather.

What Do You Dream Of? {a guest post}

Greetings from Chicago! I'm on a quick trip to the International Housewares show. Please welcome guest poster Breanne from Bella Vita. She's a new mom, new to blogging, a Lost fan and was a contestant on Jeopardy. Her daughter is as cute as a bug!

Nothing Happens Unless First We Dream- Carl Sandberg

Hi, Mel A Dramatic Mommy readers! Thanks so much to Melanie for the chance to guest blog for her! My name’s Breanne, and my blog is Bella Vita—“beautiful life” in Italian. I am an optimistic person who believes life is inherently beautiful, and I’m also the proud momma of a little girl named Bella. 

As a woman still trying to adjust to life as mom, I’ve been thinking a lot about goals, ambitions, and dreams over these first seven months of my daughter’s life. Of course, I’ve thought a lot about my dreams for my baby girl. For her to be smart, funny, loving, generous, healthy, and most of all, happy. 

Will she want to be a scientist? An actress? A writer, like her mommy? Or maybe she’ll want to be something brand-new, that hasn’t even been created yet. Had my mom heard the word “blogger” when I was born in the eighties? Nope.

In the midst of all these thoughts about my dreams for Bella, I thought a lot about my dreams for myself as well. I can’t lie: the first few weeks were so overwhelming to me because of my baby’s sleep issues that it honestly felt like I would never be able to write again.

But of course, that wasn’t true. She adjusted to the big, new world, and my husband and I adjusted to her. So after a few weeks—okay, months—I was once again able to devote a little time to other goals and aspirations I have for my life: the things that I wish for myself. 

Over these past few months, as I’ve really thought about what I want to do, what I want to be, I've come to realize that many people actually have at least two major ideas about what they want to be, two types of goals for their lives. The first is the more “realistic” one, the one that has some foundation in what you went to school for, or the career path you’re already on. But the second is the wild and out-there dream, the one you may keep to yourself if you’re not brave enough to share it, the one you might be afraid people would laugh at. 

So many people I know and love have both types of dreams. My friend Sarah is currently in med school and wants to be a family practice doctor; if she could, she would also love to be a Christian missionary to Africa. Another friend, Kristi, majored in biology and wants to work at a zoo or aquarium. However, I suspect that she just might be happiest if she were in her other dream job: a waitress on a beach—preferably in Aruba. My husband has the dual dreams, too. He’s in public works in the small Midwestern town we live in, and someday, he’d like to achieve more of a management role in his field. But he’s said to me before that sometimes he wishes he’d gone to culinary school. He’s a fantastic cook, and I know he’d love working as a chef. 

So what are mine? Well, I work hard on growing my blog and making it meaningful; I also work on my fiction, with several short stories and a novel in progress, so ultimately, I want to be a published writer. My crazy dream? I want to own my own bakery. The awesome, work-of-art cake type of bakery. Wedding cakes, celebration cakes, sculpted cakes. I’d make them all, and they’d all be beautiful. 

In reality, I’ve just started exploring this as a new hobby, but in my dream, I have my own successful bakery business, and when my daughter is older, she’ll come visit me after school and help me make the cakes. I have such a clear picture of this in my head, and in a strange way, it means as much to me as the pictures in my head of my successful writing career. 

What about all of you? What are your more grounded dreams, and what are your wildest dreams? I'd love to hear them.