November 9th was our 180 day mark. To make things go as smoothly as possible, we did some recon a few days before the 180 day mark to figure out what exactly we needed at our fingertips for the online reservation process. We had previously read various posts from people saying they were up early and couldn't get through or the restaurants were fully booked by the time they logged on or they couldn't find their reservation confirmation number etc. We didn't want to be scrambling around finding stuff while the reservations filled up.
The night before ADR time, we found out that the online reservations opened at 5am CST so we set our alarm clocks 20 mins early (just to be safe
), set the coffee maker and gathered our necessities... credit card at the ready, (for the signature meal bookings), confirmation number, planned meal schedule, pen and paper (not sure why we got that, seems like a pen and paper is a good thing to have when something important is happening!), made sure the laptops were put on charge, added the ADR reservation pages to our online bookmarks and off to bed we went.
Next morning, we were up and ready to go by 4:50am
and were rapidly refreshing the ADR page hoping it would open early. And it did! It was 4:57am and away we went!!
Forgot to mention we had prioritized our ADRs in order of importance. Paris' birthday lunch at CRT was top of the list. We were able to get almost all of our ADRs within a few minutes of our planned times. We had been thinking all along it would be a fight to get anything close to what we wanted, so we were very surprised. One ADR we didn't get was lunch at 'Ohana on Friday. Guess that must be a popular one because it was pretty high on our priority list but we still couldn't get it within an hour of when we needed it. Based on our schedule, we couldn't be any more flexible than that. We did get 'Ohana for dinner a few days before that though, so we're not so upset that we didn't get it for lunch. We're still planning to try periodically in the event someone cancels, so we'll have to see.
Some comments about the ADR Site...
While we were pleasantly surprised at our luck booking the ADRs, we were surprised by how hard WDW has made the ADR booking process. Did anyone else find it cumbersome?
It took over an hour and a half to get all of our reservations. There were these annoying checkbox selections that appeared after each reservation asking if we needed highchairs and booster seats. Something else that was annoying was we had to select all of the attendees for each reservation. WDW should really have a "remember last" option so we don't have to do that. Having to select 2 adults and 3 kids each time really adds to the time needed to book a reservation.
And what's the deal with the reservation confirmation numbers!!!??? We had no idea that our account would not give us access to our ADRs once they were booked! The only way to pull a reservation up is to know the confirmation number... and how the heck are we supposed to know it if we didn't write it down?! Never occurred to me that we would have to write it down because it would disappear into oblivious once we closed our browser!
So the next job once we were done booking was to call WDW and have the rep read off each confirmation number
At the end of the day, we were happy with the way things turned out, a few hiccups aside.
Next up, I'll post our ADR schedule.
I just couldn't help myself!
when we first arrive. Adam wants ears too.
The CS agent for United laughed his butt off when I tried adding my baby to our flight.... He told me to of course call back after our baby makes his big debut. 
Put our $200.00 deposit down. It was a good feeling to get it officially booked.
, ready for the 180 day ADR deadline.
