My Kingdom for an ADR

Trying to plan out the restaurants we want to enjoy during our honeymoon has been one great ongoing puzzle. I think the big challenge with it being Girl Scout Fiancée's first trip to Disney World is going to be balancing trying to get in as many great experiences as possible without wearing ourselves down to exhaustion. As I have been planning out the honeymoon, I've been trying to find the right pacing for the trip; I don't want to put too many fancy dining experiences all in a row, and I want to make sure that the really nice dinners where we'll want to dress up come on days where we have had all day to relax.

This is what my brain looks like while trying to plan restaurant outings.

The key to making this happen is the Advanced Dining Reservation. Not only have I recently learned that you can book ADRs online, I've also discovered that, for those staying on the Disney property, you can book your ADRs for the first ten days of your trip starting at 6 AM, 180 days from the first day of your reservation (as opposed to 180 days from each day of your reservation). I found a great post on the DIS forums that gives some solid instructions for booking your ADRs for the first ten days of your stay.

Here's our problem: the first five days of our stay are the lead up to the wedding, the wedding, and a day to recuperate from the wedding and say goodbye to our guests. That means I'll only be able to book ADRs for the first 5 days of the honeymoon once our window opens, meaning the last 5 days are going to be only bookable 180 days from each day. This is going to make it really hard to get in some of the restaurants I want us to hit, because I don't want to just cram all of the hard-to-get reservations in to the first five days.

The tigers at Animal Kingdom, impersonating Girl Scout Fiancée and I by day five.

The trickiest piece of the puzzle is juggling the California Grille, Be Our Guest, Cinderella's Royal Table, and the Wishes dessert party. I don't want to have dinner at California Grille until after we've already been to the Magic Kingdom, so Girl Scout Fiancée gets to see the fireworks in the park first. Likewise, I've heard Cinderella's Royal Table is nice during the fireworks, but I'd been thinking up to this point of doing an early dinner at Be Our Guest, followed by the Wishes dessert party fireworks viewing, on our first night there, then doing Cinderella's Royal Table the day we come back to the park, and California Grille on one of our relaxation days. Since all three of those are tough-to-get reservations, I'm not certain we'll be able to do all three, because I certainly don't want to cram them all into the first three days of the honeymoon.

UPDATE: Rather than fret by myself about this, I decided to ask some of the fine folks one one of the larger Disney message boards. Turns out, the reservation window moves forward as each day passes, meaning that I can book for the first ten days exactly 180 days before our check-in date, and then one additional day each subsequent day after that. This means about a week of being up at 3 AM (yay, living on the West Coast) to make reservations, but perhaps I can arrange it so I won't need to do that more than once or twice.