Disney!

This year we decided to treat the kids to a trip to Disneyland Paris as their Christmas present.Darren has run out of leave so I took his Mother instead to give her a break, FIL has alzheimers and now the disease has progressed to a stage where sadly he is completely disabled he is in hospital while a plan for his care is worked out so it seemed to be a good time to try and insist she got a break! The break started eventufully when she forgot her handbag containing her passport, money etc and Darren had to chase us down with it. Fortunately we hadnt travelled that far before I asked her for her passport and we discovered it was missing!
Fortunately she had remembered Darrens Christmas present to me which I had early( which is probably why she forgot the handbag!) He had bought me a fanastic digital camera which was just what I had been wanting for ages!( pics here are taken with it- I admit I went a bit mad and took hundreds!)

It was a week of firsts, we'd never used the Eurotunnel before as a family but it was really fast, efficient and very easy. Never again will we take the Ferry from Dover!

I found driving on the right easy and neednt have worried, the roads are generally really quiet in france anyway!

We'd bought annual passes when we visited in the summer ( cheaper than buying a three day adult ticket each) so we could come and go as we pleased. It was very cold and pounded down with rain for the first three days so it was quite miserable

As you can see it was pretty miserable in the cold to start with( connor wore this expression for much of the first few days!)

However the weather did break by wednesday and it turned from non stop rain to cold and clear and it was so much easier to have a nice time!

as you can see the light's were gorgeous, this is the view each way down the main street with the castle lit up at night.




Sophie managed to wear her 'Belle' dress when it turned dry and clear and have her picture taken. She was thrilled as the staff make an extra effort to talk to the children when they are dressed up

Other highlights included meeting 'Goofy' Father Christmas

and the real Mcoy, santa in his grotto after a very very long wait!

Fortunately they did let me take pictures so we didnt have to shell out for the very expensive ones which they offer!

Chloe especially enjoyed the Parades, both the night and day ones and has insisted that I add some pictures here as she uses the blog to show friends at school pictures that we have( the blog is on her list of OKed sites at school) so here they are. The floats were really impressive and she watched the parades 3 or 4 times eqach, braving the crowds in order to do so which is a massive achievement for her,2 years ago during her worst times in Primary school she hated crowded places so much we feared she was becoming Agoraphobic

The night 'Fantillusion parade was really breathtaking, these are just three of the 12 or so floats used, all lit up they were thrilling to watch almost floating down the darkened street. We managed to watch from the top of the castle!
The kids enjoyed the rides and we discovered Connor shares Sophies love of Rollercoasters!
They all got to practice their French and Connor learned to count up to 5 in French just by asking what the words were for the amount of seats we needed on the rides and working out himself which order they went in to 'count'

It was really quiet ( by disney standards) during the midweek too so they hardly had to queue on the rides ! Its definitely worth going then, interestingly they bumped into three families from their old school who were all visiting together and had taken their kids out to visit!
We're home now, catching up on sleep and dirty washing. Its nice to get back to some sort of normality but now the realisation dawns that Christmas is just days away, none of the Christmas cards got posted( GRR) nor the presents and I havent finished Christmas shopping either yet! I want to go back and escape reality again now Ive had another dose of happy domesticity