Everyone is amazed at the villa.
They would have been happy spending two hours there. Some of the children assume the couch and remote position where there is a show about all that there is to do at GKTW. There is a ring at the door and a volunteer came in with a basket of special food for dd. Nancy, the GKTW special diets food coordinator from the gingerbread house did shopping for dd and provided some of her special foods so that we would not have to travel to a healthfood store. I can’t remember everything but it included frozen organic cherries and strawberries, guava juice, corn free hot dogs, molasses, organic candy bars, tapioca flour, organic carrots, butter and walnuts. DD ate some of the corn free, gluten free salami that I had brought from home (I brought about ½ a lb.) There was milk in the fridge at the villa and she drank milk with her salami and ate a few dried cherries that I had brought. I didn’t anticipate that she would not want frozen fruit because it was different from what she was used to, but that is what happened.
I would say, have some standby foods, like carrots which are the same everywhere, or ground beef or steak, which is the same everywhere, or milk, cocoa, and sugar to make chocolate milk….at the time she was having a difficult time adjusting to food being different from home. I could see that we were going to be majoring on the ice cream from friendlies this trip and I was so thankful for all the work that Nancy had done to make sure dd had food that she could eat. I also was so glad that we had made ADR’s with the Disney chefs for special mid day meals too.
Each child unpacked their bags into dressers and put their suitcases into the closets and settled in. My Mom and I dressed the girls in their dance costumes with swimsuit covers over them for village idol. Village idol is the talent show that they have at GKTW for the dream children and their siblings. Aristacat girl has choreographed and for two weeks the girls have been practicing a dance routine for the song “Somewhere in my dreams” from the movie sleeping beauty. I had tried to buy the song from the
Disney store in our town, but they did not have it. It was too late to buy it off of the internet and get it mailed. It is now just hours before their performance and the girls do not have music to the song they were performing.
They had been practicing off of the sleeping beauty movie, which plays the song over and over throughout the movie, fast forwarding and rewinding. RG says that he can stay back behind in the villa while we see GKTW, and he can try to find a way to download the song off of the internet onto the laptop. After they unpack, one by one they gather in the living room, sitting on the couch and chairs, watching the things to do at GKTW on TV. Once the girls are ready, I say lets not just watch GKTW on TV, lets go see GKTW!! Everyone except for RG piles into the van and drives a short distance to parking that is just beside the main village area. It was probably 4:00, there was an hour and a half to explore GKTW. So, four things were going to happen later, 5:30 parents night out where the children are fed dinner and play in the castle of miracles with volunteers, 6:00 dinner for the adults, 7:00 orientation for one of us (I was selected), and 7:00 village idol. The first thing we went and saw was the castle of miracles.
You see the big door to the building that looks like a gigantic mushroom is growing out of it.
You enter and Rusty, a mini knight in shining armour, greets you with a “welcome to the castle”.
The children were amazed. I remember how funny it was when 14 year old AAAT girl said, “Hey, lets go play in the spooky forest!” The volunteer says cheerfully “We call it the Jolly Hollow” LOL. Everything is positive at GKTW!!! The jolly hollow is this cool forest type room in the castle of miracles where children can climb and slide down a slide and it is like you are playing in a forest. There are nature sounds, and little things that you look in and see mini scenes of make believe that you would expect to see in any jolly hollow forest.
Just outside the Jolly Hollow forest, there was a wishing well, and a magic mirror, and the pillow machine. The children asked for money to make a wish, and the wishing well makes funny sounds when you put money into it.
Everyone made a wish in the wishing well, and then looked at their faces in the magic mirror.
None of the pictures of all of these things saved to the memory stick. These are stock photos that they give you on the last day. Black ear envy bought the memory stick off ebay from a company based out of Hong Kong. I don’t know if it was because of that, or the camera. We had two idenical cameras though, he borrowed a camera from work for the trip and we used the extra camera’s battery as an extra battery. The volunteer turned on the pillow making machine, and bubbles started coming out. Each of the four younger children made themselves a pillow. The pillow machine makes music and shakes and all kinds of commotion happens to make that pillow. It was awesome.
The children opened up drawers and looked in cabinets in the castle of miracles and they made sounds when you opened them!
They sat in the thrones in the king and Queen throneroom area. The ceiling in the castle of miracles is covered in stars. Every wish child recieves an evelope with a star in it and an invitation to give their star to the star fairy. Overnight the star fairy places their star up on the ceiling of the castle. DD put her star on later in the week.
They went in and looked at all there was to do in the make believe room called the fefifofunroom, from play kitchens to costumes. They played with this big storybook video game.
The carosel was closed because it had rained earlier.
We left the castle of miracles determined to come back and went to see the amberville train station.
I believe the train was closed because of rain when we first got there but it did start to run while we were there and volunteers came to see if we would like to ride the train. The girls and I rode on the train and dd got to ride in the front car and be the honorary engineer. A volunteer gave dd a certificate for being the engineer for the trip.
Inside Amberville, was a mini train set that is interactive. DD went by and pushed all of the buttons to make the train light up or trains go and pieces move.
They played with that for a while then went in and played in a game room where there was one of those bop em games where you take the big mallot and bop things as they pop up.
Then, they go around and see this room where there is a control area in with ships wheels like a ships captain would use in front of big glass windows. The windows have a view of a water area that has miniature motorized boats that the child really gets to control from inside. They were having so much fun operating the boats and didn't want to leave.
The rocking chairs were by the entrance to Amberville train station, by the model train area, and quite a bit of furniture was moved around so that the configuration wasn't like the stock photos. The livingroom furniture was in the boat area. Also, some areas might need some touch up painting, just incase volunteers are seeing these stock photos and thinking GKTW doesn't need donations for upkeep of their facility on an ongoing basis. I think that once a year imagineers from disney and universal come to paint at GKTW. The only downside of showing the stock photos is that people wouldn't know that GKTW has ongoing needs and the cost of maintaining the facility must be staggering!!! That or the amount of volunteers it takes is staggering too, or both! They can always use more volunteers, and right now they are in the middle of a expansion project to build more villas.
It is almost 5:30, and time for us to go back to the villa and check on how RG is doing with getting the song downloaded. Black ear envy doesn’t understand why we should drop the children off at parent’s night out when we are having so much fun. I explain that he is not used to a whole week with his children and this will be his only hour of silence without children for the whole trip. I suggest he takes advantage of it.
We load up the van and go back to the villa to get RG and find out that he was not able to download the song off of the internet. We are trying to think of ideas of what we could do and we think of dropping the children off at parents night out, sending Black ear envy to walmart to get the sleeping beauty movie and see if we can play it over the audio system. Black ear envy is a whiz at audio/video/sound manipulation and if there is a vcr tape, he might be able to convert the vcr audio recorded to the laptop and burn a disk. We decide to ask GKTW if they have a vcr hooked up to their theater, or if they have a copy of the movie sleeping beauty when we get to the castle of miracles.
We sign the children into parents night out and two very cheerful volunteers take our children. It seems like the volunteer ratio is high, 1 to every 2 children or 1 per sibling group.
We found out that with a child who has food allergies, arrangements need to be made with Nancy at the Gingerbread house, or the kitchen staff about their next days menu one day before so they can pull food out from the ingredients the next morning and prepare it separately. We didn’t do it this day, but we did make arrangements the rest of the week.
This is aristacat girls memories of parents night out. The girl who was babysitting ds, dd, AAAT girl and aristacat girl all played Candyland with them. They played with mister potato head guys and made an army, lining up a bunch of them looking the same. The leader was the only one who didn’t look the same, he had a mustache. The mister potato head army was aristacat girls idea. The girls then went to the dress up area and dressed up. The babysitter put a little tiny dragon costume on her head and they thought it was so funny. Dd got dressed in a kitty costume, it was black with a cheetah tail. They dressed up in crazy costumes. Then they went to eat at the gingerbread house.
They lined up for food and it was pizza and were given a choice of sprite or pink lemonade, aristacat girl picked sprite. DD could not have any of these items. I should insert here that it is really difficult for dd to watch other kids eat pizza….and there is no substitute that we have come up with that can replace pizza or make her feel better about watching other people eating pizza, with the exception of maybe a really nice KC strip steak. I believe that the child psychology behind this thinking is that her meal has to make the other kids sorry they are only having pizza, in order to be fair and equitable to her. Pizza and birthday cake are our only big issues, that and egg nog.
There was no pre planning here because we didn’t know there was going to be pizza. Dd didn’t have any food and it took ½ an hour before she got food, and it was milk, a hot dog, a candy bar, and I tell the backstory of what it took to get her food a little later in this story. They went to the julie's safari theater, and got their numbers, and they were #3. They gave all the children except dd popcorn, slushies, and sour powdery candy that you get from a tube. There was a powder machine that filled the tubes. The powder turned Aristacat girls tongue green and she liked it because she pretended she was eating catnip.
Back the adults. We ask a volunteer about our music issue. We check the list of songs and find out that while they have like 20 other Disney songs and many princess songs to choose from on the karaoke, the song they practiced their routine to isn’t one of them. I ask aristacat girl if they could do the same dance steps to a different song. She looks at me, and says absolutely not, they can only dance to the song they practiced to. I am at that moment so wishing I would have called GKTW before they chose the song they danced to. They go get the volunteer in charge of the village idol who comes over and talks to us about what could be done. We explain the situation, and they say, first, lets see if we have the song. We go over into this little room where they have a huge stash of different CD’s and it just so happens that they do have the song! O my! We are all so estatic, even they are estatic because it is a rare song and they didn’t know they had it. They go and set up the audio for her song and add it to the karaoke, and we leave the castle of miracles for dinner at the gingerbread house and it is about 6.
A volunteer asks how we are enjoying our trip and I say it has been lovely so far and I only wish that I could see my daughter in village idol but it is the same time as orientation. She asks if we can send another adult in our group to orientation, but neither RG or Grandma want to go in my place. We enjoy a nice quiet meal and get a call from AAAT girl that they are somewhere eating and dd is hungry and there is no food for her. I ask there at the gingerbread house and this is where I figure out that they do not have anything because of needing to coordinate special foods one day in advance when they prep the foods.
I say that we can take the van and go back to the villa to get her food, but GKTW sends a volunteer with a golf cart to whiz me back to the villa quicker. We pick up some hot dogs, milk, nuts, carrots and guava juice. I place her foods in our portable cooler and arrange to come back much later that evening to pick up the cooler. I get whizzed back to the gingerbread house, and they made dd special food and brought it to her at the theater. These are the kinds of things that the volunteers do that is “normal” to them, every day to every child who enters GKTW village, they go out of their way to make sure each child has everything they need and are made to feel very special.
I go the direction of the orientation, which is at the same place where you check in and where the main offices are, the house of hearts.
Rg, Grandma and Black Ear Envy head over to the Julies Safari theater for village idol.
The same volunteer that asked me how I was and I said that I was great and wished that I wasn’t going to miss village idol was the volunteer who gave orientation. I swear that she wasn’t offended at all and as a matter of fact, I felt like she talked faster than she probably normally does, to have orientation end sooner just for me. I did learn things at orientation, like on any given day there are 3,000 volunteers at GKTW. They have the tourist volunteers who come and stay for a week and stay at an offsite hotel, their regulars who live in the area and come weekly, and their paid staff. Each volunteer wears a different color name tag, and that is how you tell the difference between them. I thought, what a lovely thing to do to organize a trip for a group to go and volunteer at GKTW. I could see a group of older teens volunteering, or having a family reunion in Orlando and a whole family could volunteer at GKTW together. I received a white envelope with a GAC which is the front of the line pass, for Disney and universal, a 3 day park hopper for Disney, a 2 day pass for universal/ioa, and tickets to seaworld. This is what comes in the GKTW ticket package. It contained tickets for our family, and not my mom. My mom’s tickets were given to us by our wish organization and so were our Discovery cove tickets and were deducted from our expense check. As you can see, way more tickets than days, but the Seaworld doesn’t expire until 2/08, and the Universal tickets don’t expire until 8/08. We plan on making a return trip to Orlando to use up some of the tickets we didn’t use and use the world pass. Afterwards, I thanked the volunteer who gave the orientation, I asked no questions, or stopped to talk to the other parents in orientation, I just snuck right out of there hoping that village idol would still be going on.
There was a short walk across from the house of hearts to the julies safari theater. Village idol was still going on. I made it in time to see the last two acts. Both acts brought tears to my eyes. A small African american girl, clearly very ill, dancing when she could barely move and had to drag one leg, but she was trying so hard, and the look on her face could be seen on the big screen that it was a moment of triumph for her to be able to get up there and dance. I was tearing up. Not in a sad way, but in a joyful way to be able to share a special moment like that with a child and their family.
A sibling group of children got up and sang in a karaoke style, Beyonce’s, “Irreplaceable”, only singing your irreplaceable to a sibling with a life threatening illness took a whole new meaning in this context, and when they sang the part "you're irreplaceable", voices soaring, you knew they weren't really talking about some boyfriend trying to leave with Beyonce's jag, but their sibling who was irreplaceable to them. Now I was really tearing up. What a great experience for everyone there.
After each performance, a group of judges would make positive comments on the children’s performances. The judges were wish children and their siblings. AAAT girl and ds were both chosen to be judges. One of the girls who was a judge was also very sick, and could barely talk. The announcer would ask her what she said and if she couldn’t talk, would make up something really cool and tell everyone she said that.
I have to say that all of our experiences at GKTW were power packed with fun, they really know what kids like to do and what means the most to them. If you ask any of the children they will tell you that all our evenings and times at GKTW were just as fun as being at themeparks. There was one exception. Navigating themeparks is work, and can be exausting and hot, for the fun. GKTW is not work, and is not exausting or hot, and is still just as fun as a themepark, which is what makes the place so special and amazing.
I didn’t know this, but you can get the list of songs that GKTW has on their Kareoke machine ahead of time to be able to practice before your wish trip.
Although I had missed the girls performance, and the camera did not permanently save the performance on tape, for some reason the performance was in a temporary file. I was able to watch the girls performance on the camera once before it vanished. What happened was such a shocker. I have a few photos taken of the performance taken by the GKTW photographer.
Aristacat girl is the outgoing girl who choreographed and planned the whole dance routine. At home, DD looked to her for what movements to do and it was cute because there was like the split second delay between the two girls. On stage, Aristacat girl froze with stage fright! Just like on the Brady Bunch, if you remember that episode. Completely frozen.
You could see dd kind of look at Aristacatgirl with big eyes, but surprisingly she pressed forward and danced the routine and steps without her. So, there is this guy who is dressed really crazy, and he walks out on the stage and is dancing with dd and starts twirling Aristacat girl and making her dance and giggle. GKTW has a plan for every contingency. It was so cute. They took a potentially embarrassing moment and turned it into a funny and fun moment.
Aristacat girl told me if anyone ever needs to cast the role of a stick, she is going to try out. She didn’t feel sad though, Gktw makes each child feel special and she was able to laugh at herself. I said, just because she froze this time doesn’t mean she would freeze next time. It was her first time on a stage, was all.
After all the performances were over, they call all of the contestants up onto the stage and confetti blows down on them as they announce that they are all winners and ask the performers and the judges to make their way to the tables at the concession area of the theater for autographs. If you look closely at this picture you can see the crazily dressed guy holding up a sign that says "all winners".
this is a stock photo of the concession area where the tables were set up.
A stock photo of julies safari theater inside
There at the tables in the consession area, are medals, and a stack of autograph forms for the children to sign. People came up to all the children and congratulated them and asked them for their autographs. I was lucky to get some autographs from dd, and ds, but aristacat girl and AAAt girl were so popular, they were out of autographs by the time I got to them. The crazy dressed guy was out in the concession area after most of the crowd was gone and just contestants and their families were left and must have asked something to dd like how she thought her performance went and suddenly dd cries out because she has just realized. “I forgot to do my grand finale!!!!” The crazy dressed guy asks “What was your grand finale, can you show us now?” Then, she hops down onto the floor and does her famous move where she touches her feet to her head and everyone in the room cheers and claps. She was beaming from ear to ear. She did get to do her grand finale after all and I got to see it too.
You know when I thnk of our "meeting" you know the one I'm talking about. While we were waiting I asked Cindy what her fav. thing about GKTW was so far and she said that I can eat Ice Cream!! I told my DH about it that night and just cried. It was so sweet and here she was surrounded by all these things and to her it was this miracle that she could have ice cream. I remember Tyler asking me about it later, because he loves ice cream, and he was eating those Mickey bars every day. When I explained to him about her food allergys and how she couldn't just go eat ice cream like he could, I remember he got this WOWed expression on his face and was like, You mean someone went and found her some that she could eat just for her. THat's way cool mom. Yep It wasWAY cool and what was even better was seeing her smile about it
So glad you took pics of the inside of your villa, I wasn't very smart that way,
so would you mind if I showed some of them to my family? 
BTW, did your alarm clock say "CHARGE!" over and over every morning when it went off, or were we the only ones *blessed* with that one?
I get so excited every time I see pictures of this place. I am sort of glad I still have over 2 months because each passing week actually builds the excitement even more. Keep the info. coming, I am loving it!!
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