What's In My Diaper Bag: Packing Light For Disney World With A Baby

The biggest mistake we made while traveling to Disney World with a Baby (9 month old) was over-packing a large diaper bag - hoping to be prepared for every scenario.

Instead, we felt really held back. Our diaper bag was heavy, it took up a lot of room in our rental stroller, we didn’t feel comfortable leaving it in the stroller when we’d go on rides (meaning it was a burden during rides too), and it was filled with a bunch of stuff we never even touched our whole trip.

After our first park day in Epcot, we reconsidered our whole set up, headed down to Disney Springs that afternoon to purchase a Loungefly Backpack, and started all over.

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What’s In My Diaper Bag

It’s easy to feel like you’re forgetting something when you’re packing light to Disney World, but you’ll still be prepared for most things that lie ahead with these essentials. If not, more likely than not, you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for to purchase in the Parks.

Our Diaper Bag

Like I mentioned before, I swapped our large diaper bag from home for a Disney Loungefly Backpack that we purchased at Disney Springs. Our bag is a size “mini” and still held quite the amount of space. We picked this backpack specifically because:

The faux vegan leather is thick and water proof. With the Florida weather, you never know when to expect rain. We did not want to end up with wet, soggy, and unusable diapers on the chance it began down pouring rain.
The compact space still holds a lot of stuff. As you continue reading, you’ll be surprised how much stuff I actually was able to fit in this tiny backpack.
There are side pockets and a front pouch for extra storage organization. I don’t like bottomless pit bags.
The design was gender neutral. My husband wears the diaper bag most of the time. I know he doesn’t care if he ended up carrying around a girly bag. Nevertheless, I thought I’d spare him with a bag we both enjoy.

In the main compartment

When filling the bag, I tried to think about what items I would use more often than others - then stacked them in the bag in that order. What sat at the bottom of the bag were things we’d use less often, and what sat at the top of the bag were items we’d reach for more often. For organizational purposes, I’ll lay out our essentials from top of the bag (most used items) to bottom of the bag (least used items).

A muslin blanket. Having a muslin blanket is such an underrated essential item. I used it as a nursing cover while breast feeding through the day, as a blanket over our daughter in the evenings as she slept on the cold bus rides home, and even to wipe up drool (she’s been teething like crazy). An absolute essential!
5 diapers and a pack of wipes. Even though we only stayed in the parks until around Noon, we still aimed to have 5 diapers in our bag before leaving our hotel. We also had a standard half-full pack of Huggies wipes.
A change of clothes for Baby. We always had a change of clothes packed for our daughter. You just never know when a blow out is on the way. Thankfully, we never had to use the change of clothes, but it is always nice to know it is there. To keep packing light, we always packed one-piece jumpers or rompers.

In the side pockets

Like I mentioned earlier in the post, our Loungefly bag has two side pockets. In these pockets, we packed:

A bottle of Baby Sunscreen from Sun Bum. We like the Baby Sun Bum sunscreen because it smells good, is easy to apply, and didn’t leave our daughter with a sun burn at all even though it was sunny our whole trip.
Hello Bello everything balm. We prefer to bring around everything balm instead of traditional diaper rash cream because it has multi-purpose. Diaper rash, a cut or scrape, dry skin, etc. - it can do the trick!

In the front zip-pocket

In the front zip-pocket, we only had one thing: snacks for our Baby!

We liked keeping them in this pocket because it made them super easy access. Especially when we were in line for rides and she’d get hungry but we (obviously) couldn’t get to a Baby Care Center right away, we easily could grab some snacks for her to munch on in the mean time from this pocket.

Each day, we’d add a different snack, but we rotated between:

Hanging From The Bag Handle

Additionally, we had something hanging from the bag handle: a Disney-themed sensory toy.

We purchased a bunch of the Disney Baby On-The-Go Activity Toys in different characters. Each day, we’d change it up based on what she enjoyed playing with in our hotel room that morning.

We like these in comparison to other stuffed character toys because they have multiple sensory activity features to them. From textures, sounds, and bright colours - they are great for engaging all of Baby’s senses while playing.

We also like them because they have a hook at the top. When our daughter is playing with it, we hook it to her stroller strap so it doesn’t fall out of her lap and gets lost in the park. When she’s not playing with it, we hook it back to the handle on our diaper bag.

While I couldn’t find the exact same toy of Minnie Mouse on Amazon, here is a variation of the toy as Mickey Mouse*.