First, you can find some of these photos much larger on Micechat! 

I was planning to meet family over at the Magic Kingdom a couple of days ago.   Before I left the house, I received a call from my mom asking "do you want to stay in the castle tonight"?  I guess I was really loud, saying "you didn't!!!!"

I wasn't sure how random the giveaways on the Cinderellas Suite prize were.  I figured that Disney was looking for a certain type of family.   But the Dream Squad was told to look for a certain car on Buzz Lightyear, "right hand side".   And one of my family members was there!

It took 5 - 10 minutes to convince them to accept the prize.   First, the squad will call it a "potential" prize, which made it sound like they were selling something. :)   Also, this isn't really the dream of my family - their dream was to spend the night in the hotel they paid for!   But due to my BIL, and knowing that I'd enjoy it - they eventually did take it.   My family (sans me, as I was home at the time) was brought up to a small room above the Gran Prix raceway to verify the prize.

My mom called us right away, and we had 2 hours to get down to the Magic Kingdom to sign paperwork to stay in the castle.  I've never had to pack so quickly in my life!    Steve is pretty much MIA anytime I go to Disney or even Disneyland/Paris, etc. now.   But he did make it down for the evening as well.

My family had chosen not to be Grand Marshals in the parade.   So we had some time to get something to eat.   We went to the Tomorrowland Noodle Station, I was so excited it had reopened!   But the food had changed since Thanksgiving.  No more spaghettii - you can get nuggets, though (are they made of noodles?): 

We did have some leeway on what happened during the evening.  Some of my family members had never seen the lighting ceremony, so we went there first.    Dinner was pushed from 5pm to 7pm.

This is the only photo of anyone else who was part of our family, everyone likes to stay private:

We always had someone with us when not in the suite:

I only took a few pics of the castle, I have over 100 already here on the site.   (most better than these!):

After the lighting, we were brought up into the castle.   The foyer area outside the room is quite nice (and I'll have more photos later on):

A handful of photos up inside the suite, before we went to dinner: