On our honeymoon, we didn't do any rest days, including arrival day.
This November, we brought our two small kids- one 4 year old and one infant- and we did not go to the parks on arrival day, plus we had one break day at the mid-ish point. We drove in from Northern Virginia, which is a long drive made longer when you've got a baby with you. So we weren't quite sure exactly when we'd arrive in town, and really just wanted to check in, eat, and crash. Our kids are both morning people (but we're not! LOL) so we rope dropped pretty much every single day, and other than seeing RoL one night and Fantasmic another, we pretty much left the parks at sundown every day. Because of the morning/daytime-heavy nature of our touring style, we knew that the Sunday within our trip would not be a good park day, because we wanted to go to Mass in the morning which meant leaving the Disney bubble. By the time we got back to our resort, it was pretty much lunch time- meaning only a handful of hours left for the park, if we had gone. So we decided to make that a non-park day. We spent a couple of hours at the pool, then went to Disney Springs for a little bit of shopping and then dinner. To us, it was less about resting or re-charging and more about the fact that it would have felt like a waste of a park ticket, to us, to only spend a few hours in the parks.
We didn't do the mid-afternoon return-to-the-resort-for-a-nap strategy, mostly because our 4 year old refuses to nap. That's not to say the kids didn't take afternoon naps- they did, in the stroller, wiped out from sheer excitement and exhaustion, and we didn't have to bus all the way back to POR for them to sleep. We'd pull into a shady area and snack on a Dole Whip or something while they snoozed until it was time for our next FP+. Getting everybody to bed by 7ish (other than a couple of nights) was really the key to us all feeling rested and relaxed and vacation-y.
