disney prep

three weeks from today we will be in the magic kingdom! i cannot wait!! first of all, i love disney world. it is the happiest place on earth. but way more important is the fact that this will be evan's first trip there and i am just beside myself with excitement over taking him.

so i wanted him to get excited too and i know the best way to get him to learn anything is through a book. the boy has 4 books completely memorized (insane, i know, he's 19 months old) so i made him a book titled "i'm going to disney" and filled it with pictures of practically everything the magic kingdom has to offer. here is a pic of the front and the back covers:

i felt like i was back in 5th grade making these. i had all the stickers and the paper just in my craft stash from various free-be mailings/scrapbook efforts and i was just putting stickers everywhere! (you can't see the inside covers, they are really sticker-riffic!)

so it started out that i was just going to print out 36 pictures of various things in the magic kingdom that he would especially enjoy. but, in my typical style, nothing can be that simple. so i spent ALL. DAY. MONDAY. making 36 little 4x6 scrapbook pages of everything in the magic kingdom on word. here are some screen shots from my phone of a few of the pages (i will spare you the complete 36)

every page has a complement page in the same color, but i didn't line them up that way when i made them... don't ask. and yes, the book is set up as you would travel around the park. and yes, i did include the princesses, because i plan to use this book for future children and/or future nieces/nephews, hence the lack of personalization in the title. these are just a couple of examples of pages. i downloaded a trillion different fonts for the book and of course, the most time consuming task was finding the pictures i actually wanted to use.

so was the book worth all the effort? well, all morning evan was begging to go to staples (where i had the pages printed) so when i got the email saying it was ready around lunch, we went right away! i cut all of the pages down to size, put them in the book, and handed it straight to him. he LOVES it. his current favorite pages- the railroad ("ride that, ride that") and the mickey mouse page. he keeps saying "go there" and i keep telling him- we are! i am even more excited now that he is excited!