Going to WDW with my 11 month old who will be on two naps, mid morning and mid afternoon. Trying to figure out:
Whether to stay in park or head back to onsite hotel room. Will be doing early entry. Going back to hotel twice will be a major time waste though.
Do you stick to normal bedtime or let them stay up longer for a later park close? My concern here is then sleep schedule being off so we don’t make early entry or the booked multipass slots.
It will really depend on your kid. My kids have never been awesome nappers. So napping on the go worked well for us. And we do keep bedtime as close to the right time as possible. This what we did on our last trip— with our newly 1 year old.
My 2-cents:
Mom of six and each of them had WDW visits between 9 and 16 mos old. I never bothered with maintaining a schedule. If they slept in the stroller, great. If not, we’d eventually be back home and things would right themselves. Sleeping away from home and napping on demand are hard. Make memories and worry about a schedule when you get home.
I always found it way more stressful to return to the hotel room for an hour or two and try to make everyone be quiet so the littles could nap than to just do what we wanted and let them crash out in the stroller.
If you do have a little snoozing in the stroller just be aware you’ll have to take them out and collapse the stroller on busses and boats. You can roll the strollers right on the skyliner and monorail without having to do so.
For naps and sleeping if we could we’d stick the babies in a closet or bathroom without windows so it was nice and dark and crank the white noise machine.
Thanks so much for your response Figment20. With bedtimes how did you navigate dinners, book for 4/5pm? And did you ever manage the magic kingdom fireworks? Keen to go but it’s well past the littlen’s bedtime
I never took a baby, but I did go with younger kids. For that first trip, we planned dinners around 5:00/5:30, so we could eat and maybe do a thing or two after dinner, but with the plan to get out of the parks by 7:00/7:30. We never did any nighttime shows or fireworks and that worked for us. Back then, my kids were earlier risers, and we wanted to stick with decent bedtimes.
I went through 4 kids who all attended the parks during this phase. We did not slow down one bit for them. They tended to fall asleep in the stroller when they needed a nap. We occasionally tried going back to the room but the children rarely chose the appointed time to sleep.
That said, I would not burn the candle at both ends. You will be exhausted if you try to go rope drop to close, and your kids will likely get cranky. I have found it is best to make use of the time when my kids are most active and happy, which for them is usually mornings and early evenings. We were usually done by like 8pm when our kids were that age (now we can be out much later).
A “break” in the middle of the day is helpful, but not necessarily for naps, and can be in a restaurant, at an indoor pavilion (American Adventure, Living with the Land), a longer show, etc.
The littles we took to Disney nearly always napped during a meal. At least once in a stroller. Once on a banquette. Another time we were next to a wall and put him on the floor. That was the no napping kid, so we wanted him sleeping as much as he would.
In the parks, a napping in the stroller kid meant we were heading to a store to shop. Awake kids get fussy in stores
My strategy is book meals for like late breakfast or lunch. Depending on what you’re hoping to have. We usually plan QS at night— in case kids need to go to bed or just relax in the hotel.
If you want to do a dinner i would book the first dinner time.
In all my trips we have never stayed for fireworks in the park— some of the hotels we stayed at we could see from the hotel…. So I can’t help with staying for fireworks.
I can say I have taken my baby twice now and I just love it— they have all been wonderful trips. It’s so fun to see what they will be excited for.
Make sure the check out the baby rooms. The one in MK is fantastic.
This is one of those “ask 10 people and you will get 10 different answers” type questions.
So much depends on your child and also how your child is in a WDW type environment. Generally, I agree with the @QwertySC and @Jeff_AZ philosophy, but if a child if going to be cranky the rest of the day if he/she doesn’t get a nap in quiet, dark hotel room, then if it were me, I would go back to the resort for a nap (maybe you could try once a day instead of twice and see if that works).
When my son was 13 months, he would not nap at WDW in the stroller so DW and I traded off days taking him back to the resort for an afternoon nap. We did not do the fireworks when he was 13 months because of bedtime, but we did go to the fireworks when he was 24 months and better about staying up late on occasion.
My son wasn’t a great napper. He quit them completely before 2 yrs old. But my nephews took 2 naps a day until they were close to 2!
I went with my sister when the youngest was still on 2 naps. She basically bumped it down to 1, splitting the difference. He fell asleep in the evenings in the stroller while we were in the parks. She brought his jammies and changed him after dinner. He was out by 8pm. He was a good sleeper though. Nothing woke him up. She did have the stroller set up for comfy and quiet sleeping- heavy blanket over the top. Weather was comfortable outside though, not hot.
She never woke him up in the mornings. She let him sleep while every one got ready.
Every kid is different though. If you need to stick to 2 naps I would probably plan a big meal and resort time between the two. I don’t think I’d rush back to a park unless my resort’s within walking distance of one.
I agree with this. Every child is different so it takes some trial and error to figure out what will work. There’s no right or wrong answer, except finding the right balance of doing what you want to do vs. what the child will tolerate.
With kids, we like to plan early lunch and early dinner- avoiding popular lunch/dinner times to minimize our wait for a table/food, and to hit up rides when others might be trying to eat.
I did whatever we needed to to get our 11 month olds to sleep. The first trip with an 11 mo old, he slept in the stroller well. The second trip, she slept in a baby carrier well, so that’s what we did. No one napped well in the hotel rooms. Too much stimulus. We skipped fireworks when we went with a 11 month old and a 2.5 year old. The 2.5 year old wasn’t sleeping well and needed that 8:00 bedtime, and the 11 mo old was waking up the 2.5 year old at 5 AM every day and the toddler wouldn’t go back to sleep so we just rope dropped every day- this fireworks didn’t factor in. The second trip was with a 5, 3, and 11 mo old and we did MK fireworks one night as our late night. They made it, but it’s definitely not something we’d do every night. I prefer to rope drop and get a decent bedtime with littles.
But when our kids were on a 2 nap schedule, we had them nap in park, or if we were at Epcot or Holllywood studios, we’d leave the park and go for a stroll along the river or the boardwalk/lake area.
I’ll provide my experience which is a little different than some of the others here. We went with our now DS7 when he was 10 months and again at 20 months. He was a kid that really did need at least one solid nap a day. So our routine (and we still do this to this day, but more for full relaxation than the necessity for a nap) was to go back to the hotel after lunch and give him a nap. While he was napping one of us would take his older brother to the pool or video arcade or something.
We let any other naps happen organically. For the first trip, my wife would wear him in a baby carrier a lot and he’d often fall asleep there, or in the stroller. For the second trip the stroller was the place for a nap. We tended to be up and out early but not do too much at night after 8, although my wife and I did take turns going out to a park after dinner with my older son.
But as has been mentioned, every child is different and every parent is different. You know your kid - in sure you’ll figure out what works best for them and your family. Hopefully all the different approaches here will give you options to figure that out.
I second the likelihood of trial and error. Our first trip (with a 14 month old and 4 year old) I thought it would work best to go back to the resort, but one or both would fall asleep along the way and then wake up when we got back to the room. When we tried naps in strollers in the parks it worked much better. Maybe it should depend on whether you yourself prefer a break at the resort during the day.
We kept to bedtime with the exception of the last night.
Thanks for your response QwertySC! I do love your roll with it philosophy. Did you keep bedtimes and morning wake times the same (or similar) or did you let that happen organically too?