OK - I'll repeat my advice from the Alice in Wonderland line
1. Buy the meal plan. With all of your reservations, you'll come out money ahead. Just remember, you will get an appetizer, dinner, dessert, and drink with each sit down dinning location. Use your snack for breakfast and you'll be fine with a counter service meal as your other meal (meal, drink, and dessert).
2. Buy the refillable cup and smuggle it in to as many places as you can. That $12 will be the best $12 spent your whole trip. If you do that, you can get bottled water with your counter service meal. It'll save you a ton on drinks the whole trip. We quickly noticed that the cup was a generic 2007 cup that everyone else had. We used it at every resort we visited. Coffee, soda, tea, hot chocolate, etc.
3. Do not miss Boma! It is the best buffet there hands down. Mr. Swanie really enjoyed the African wine tasting. For something like $12 he got three different glasses of wine to taste...and to our surprise they were full glasses. He did the red wine selection, but you could also do a white wine sampling.
4. A warning if you have reservations and are relying on the buses... We didn't have any trouble getting from a theme park to another resort since that was direct, but it sucked having to make transfers after dinner with 3 small kids. If you decide not to rent a car, budget for a taxi because you're looking at a 45 minute minimum ride back to your resort (and that's if you have no wait for either bus. If you have to wait, you could be looking at 1:20, and that's with the buses running on their normal 20 min. schedule. With that all said, if you're planning on going back to a theme park to hang out, it isn't such an issue.
5. Give yourself at least 2 days at Epcot. I know you plan on doing the Food and Wine Festival, and that alone will take a whole day. I LOVED Epcot. I think we ended up there for parts of 4 days on our trip.
6. To our surprise, the normal snacks and desserts ran much cheaper than those at the DLR. I think the Mickey ice creams were only $2.25. If you do the dinning plan you can use your credits for pretty much anything under $4. We initially waited to use ours because we were trying to get the most bang for our buck, but we realized that there wasn't much that was that expensive. As a result, we came back with a full bag of snacks (13 to be exact) from the Markeplace at AKL. Cotton candy, huge boxes of cookies, bags of trail mix, etc. We even used our last counter service meals on sandwiches for the plane ride back. Oooohhh, one of the better "snacks" was a huge brownie sundae from the Mrs. Pott's at the Magic Kingdom.
7. Don't miss Expedition Everest. And try to sit in the very last row
Have an awesome time!
swanie