10 Best Disney Moments of Our First Year

Blog Birthday? Anniversary? Blog-iversary?  Well, no matter how you want to say it… we’ve hit a milestone!! Today our little blog turns 1 year old.  In many ways, starting this blog was a lot like deciding to have another child… with all the joys, frustrations, and parental differences in opinion that go along with it.

Without a doubt, this little project of ours has grown beyond our expectations, and is definitely one of the best decisions we’ve made.  We’d like to take this time to look back at some of our favorite moments of this tremendous first year!

10 Best Moments of Our First Year

1. “Home is Where the Mouse is” is born!

In February of 2013, Lisa and I sat down and came up with the idea to start our own Disney blog.  12 months later, we have nearly 4,000 Facebook followers, over 2000 Pinterest Followers, and over 1500 Twitter followers!  If anyone had told us that a year ago, we would have said they were crazy!

The Disney blogging community has welcomed us with open arms and has been so supportive! Everything so far has exceeded our expectations!!

 

2. Jackson’s 2nd Birthday!

Our little man turned 2 and we celebrated in Disney style, with a Mickey Mouse Farm Birthday Party! There wasn’t much out there for this party, so Lisa came up with most of the ideas from scratch, or borrowed from other themes.  It’s been one of our most popular “Pins”.  In fact, party posts in general have become a fan favorite, and something we love to blog about.

Wait until you see what we have in store for his 3rd birthday!

3. Disney pins our blog post!

As Disney bloggers, we are constantly looking for feedback from other Disney fans on how we’re doing. We consider it a great compliment when you share one of our posts,  but boy were we surprised when it was Disney itself that repinned our post about making the most of PhotoPass on to the official Walt Disney World Pinterest account!

4. Anniversary Trip to Walt Disney World

This would be our first trip to Disney knowing that we would be blogging about it when we got home.  We thought maybe being “bloggers” would change the way we saw everything, or that we would spend too much time taking notes… but thankfully that wasn’t the case…  but we did plenty of new things to share with you!


We celebrated our anniversary

Our 8th wedding anniversary occurred while at WDW, and we arranged to spend it in our favorite park, having dinner at their newest restaurant, Be Our Guest.

We stayed at Animal Kingdom Lodge for the first time

The decor and theming were incredible, the pools were so much fun, the restaurants were amazing, and of course, having a view of the Savannah and being able to see the animals from your balcony is magical!

We saw New Fantasyland in person!

I have to say we were impressed with the attention to detail and found new favorites in Enchanted Tales with Belle and Gaston’s Tavern!  We can’t wait for the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train to open to complete the expansion

5. Disney Parks Moms Panel search

 

For the past few years, I’ve been applying to the Disney Parks Moms Panel.  Each year has had 3 rounds of the application process, and this past year was the first time that Lisa applied along with me.  Even though Lisa didn’t get past the first round, It was still a great experience doing it together.  For me, it was my second time through to the second round, but again I fell short of the final round and a chance to be on the panel.

Each year the process allows us to expand our circle of Disney friends through online groups, and this year we got to see several people we “know” get chosen for the panel!!

For us… there’s always this year… or the year after that… or the year after that…

6. Frozen

It may seem odd to put a movie on this list, but it’s been a long time since a Disney movie has had such influence.  Our entire family loved the movie, seeing it in the theaters 3 times, and currently waiting impatiently for the DVD release.  We even threw a Frozen-themed birthday party for Bella in January.

7. Writing for WDW Magazine

For the past several months, we’ve been contributing articles to WDW Magazine. It’s been a great experience to collaborate with some other great bloggers and writers, and we’re honored that they’ve asked us to write more.

8. Our First runDisney trip!

 

In January, we escaped the bitter cold at home for a quick trip to Walt Disney World, where everyone got to participate in their first runDisney races!  It was an amazing experience, and I think we’re hooked and currently trying to plan our next runDisney trip!

9. Joining the Magical Blogorail

Since the very beginning of our blog, one of our dreams was to be a part of the Magical Blogorail.  It was such a great concept and we enjoyed reading the loops on various topics.  We were thrilled to get asked to join as “junior pilots” and do our first guest blogging posts on the blogorail… showing off our DisneySide!

 

 

10. Throwing a #DisneySide @Home Celebration

What a way to cap off our first year!! This weekend, we threw our #DisneySide @Home Celebration, celebrating the magic of Disney Animation with a “Golden Mickeys” awards-style party!  

It’s been an eventful first year, and we hope to bring you lots more in this upcoming year!! So tell us, we’d love to hear from you!  Leave a comment below to let us know what you liked about our blog so far, what you’d like to see from us in the future, or how you found us in the first place!!

Thank you so much for reading!! And have a magical day!!

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