About five months ago, I turned to my mother and asked, “Want to go to Disney World with me?”

“Just the two of us?”

“Yup.”

And just like that, a girls’ trip was born! I was so excited about the prospect of going to Disney World with my mom – the first and only other time she’d gone was back in 2000 – that I didn’t really think about some of the logistics; namely, that it would be somewhat daunting to handle a couple parts of the trip due to both of us having type 1 diabetes. I couldn’t help but wonder and worry about really minor issues, like:

• How would we handle pod changes?
• How many extra medical supplies would we need between the two of us?
• What about food – did I schedule all of our dinners at appropriate times? Would we find healthy options in the parks?
• How would we keep our insulin vials cool?

It’s not like I haven’t been to Disney World in recent years – in fact, this was my fourth time going in the last five years – but it was just different going with my mom. I was the only T1D there in the recent trips, so I only had to worry about taking care of myself. My mom certainly doesn’t need me to take care of her, but I just get anxious when it comes to making sure we’re both adequately prepared when we’re away from home (and from my dad)!

But I was absolutely not going to let diabetes get in our way. And truthfully? It didn’t, for the most part. After all, we’ve encountered just about every kind of diabetes scenario possible. And we’ve dealt with all of them. Just because we were away from home didn’t mean that all of our knowledge on how to take care of ourselves was going to disappear. Plus, traveling with another T1D comes with a major bonus: They know just as much as you do about diabetes. They’ll understand if you need to have a snack while waiting in line for the Haunted Mansion or if you can’t drink a beer in Germany because you’re too high. They just get it.

Of course, a vacation to Disney World is unlike any other getaway. There’s a lot of considerations to make, particularly if you have T1D. My mom and I made so many memories on our trip (most of them unrelated to T1D), but the following parts of our vacation stick out as I reflect on what it’s like specifically for two T1D girls to go to Disney World.

This picture sums up how our relationship is sometimes.

Meeting Cinderella!

The most exciting part was having the chance to do something like this with my mom in the first place. For various reasons, I never thought we’d get the opportunity to do a girls’ trip – so the fact that we went was really cool for me (and hopefully for her, too).

The scariest part was planning the trip. I took on this responsibility and was happy to do it, but it was a little added pressure to make sure our daily plans would accommodate our wish lists of what we wanted to do, in addition to both of our diabetes.

The most frustrating part was guessing the carb counts for most of our meals. This is something I would love for Disney to work on – offering nutritional information for as many food items as possible. For the most part, we had success making educated guesses, but it would still be awesome if Disney could be a little more accommodating in this respect.

The most difficult part was finding a good place for us to change our pods. Due to how we schedule our pod changes, they were set to expire when we’d be well into our days at the parks. And even more irritating was that between the two of us, we’d need to change our pods on four separate days of our vacation. So it was definitely inconvenient timing, but diabetes doesn’t care about that! However, we worked it out by asking a cast member (a Disney employee) for some help. She told us that a companion bathroom would be our best bet, so each time we had to deal with a pod change, we located the nearest one and did what we needed to do. It was a little stressful to do our pod changes in such a small space, but the privacy was worth it. And even though it was a challenge, we overcame it.

The most relieving part was what didn’t happen – no pod failures the entire trip! That meant we watched our favorite Beauty and the Beast show at Hollywood Studios without interruption and rode countless rides in Magic Kingdom (her favorite was the Little Mermaid ride, mine was Pirates of the Caribbean) with nary a BEEEEEEEEEEP to be heard.

The most tiring part was walking 10 miles every day of our trip. Yes, 10 miles! We actually made a bit of a game out of it, to see if we could beat our mileage as we traveled from one park to the next. But I can’t say that this part didn’t come without its perks – walking so much really helped our blood sugars! It came in handy if we didn’t bolus enough at mealtimes, and when we were running low from all the movement, we were happy to correct with Mickey ice cream bars.

The most magical part was having dinner at Cinderella’s Royal Table during the Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party. Seriously, we lucked out – it’s said that Cinderella’s castle is the hardest dining reservation to make at Disney World, and if you hope to snag a booking, you’d better try to do it at least six months in advance. I desperately wanted to make this happen for me and my mom because Cinderella is our favorite princess. So when I did get a reservation for us, I knew it would be one of the best parts of our trip. Rest assured that diabetes was far from our minds as we milked this once-in-a-lifetime experience!

From enjoying a glass of champagne over dinner at the castle to reveling at the gorgeous Christmas decorations adorning the Disney property, this trip was worth it in every way. Thank you to my mom for accompanying me, and an even bigger thank you to my dad for being cool with it. And at the end of the day, it was a pretty perfect way for a mother and daughter with diabetes to kick off National Diabetes Awareness Month, don’t you agree?