Get a Pair of Mickey Ears with Your Name on Them

“First trip to Disney? You need to get a pair of Mickey Ears with your name on them on Main Street. Don’t argue with me, just go get them!”

It’s a Disney rite of passage that you come away from a visit to the Magic Kingdom with a pair of Mickey Ears that say your name on them.  I’m pretty traditional, so on Adam’s first trip we stopped into Le Chapeau on Main Street to get him his very own pair:  the original black Mickey Mouse set with the yellow lettering on the back.  While he protested a bit that he was too old for them, he spent the rest of the trip making sure they were “okay” and not getting crushed when we packed them to take back home.  I’m pretty sure he ended up hand carrying them!  A year later my aunt went with her family and won those blue Year of a Million Dreams ears which she gave to us on her return.  We were pretty jealous since we’d also gone during this time (for 14 days!) and while we saw bunches of people winning things, INCLUDING the family that got to stay in Cinderella’s Castle for the night, we won a big nothing the entire time!

These days you can get a set of ears in pretty much any Disney Park including Downtown Disney and the new twist is that you can MAKE a pair for yourself!  You can choose different sorts of ears, a different headpiece, they have them in various colors or according to various movie themes, it’s pretty amazing the sorts of things you can come up with and it’s an activity kids seem to love.  It’s a pretty cool thing to be able to have a unique set of ears to walk around the park with.  They even  have different fonts that you can choose for your name–and of course in any color thread you want!

We have made it a habit to get a set of baby ears (which come in soft pink or blue) every trip for my cousin’s kids with their name on the back.  They were the cutest things with a little round patch on the front that said “my first ears” or something like that with a baby Mickey or Minnie.  Absolutely adorable!  This past trip when we went we were pretty disappointed that they seem to have changed the style of these ears to now have just big eyes on the front.  They’re just not as cute and actually kind of ugly!  Still, we ended up buying one pair of blue and one pair of pink and getting names embroidered on them.  Since we had just gotten engaged we knew we wouldn’t be back to Disney for awhile (weddings are expensive!) but we wanted to make sure that if we go ahead and start a family, we have those ears ready whether we have a boy or a girl.  Thank goodness we had already had a talk years ago on what we’d name them!

So now those ears sit carefully wrapped up in a drawer and hopefully sometime next year we’ll be able to present them to a little girl or boy!