What a whirlwind couple of weeks since my last post. Our long anticipated trip to Disney World was finally here and we were all ready for it. We picked up Abe from the airport and immediately started our long voyage down to Florida. We had some wonderful pitstops along the way visiting great friends. We first stopped in Greensboro, NC and visited with my best friends from college. We had so much fun letting the kids play and going out for some delicious Asian food. It had been way too long since we had gotten together and I enjoyed every minute of it. After spending the night there we started off for our next stop in Columbia, SC. There was visited some more great friends that we knew from North Carolina. So we got to enjoy their beautiful new house and amazing deck as we grilled steaks and hung out. Although it is hard to move around a lot and leave such great friends it has been wonderful to now have friends all over the country that we can visit with. While I was on some of my travels for work this summer I was able to have dinner with one of my great friends from Christiansburg in Cincinati, OH and was able to visit several friends in D.C. while I passed through there. And the invitation stands that if you are ever passing through the great state of Texas you will let us know so you can visit us also.
On Day 3 of our journey we drove the rest of the way to Orlando to meet up with my parents and McKaylan and one of my other sisters and her 2 kids. Ethan and Taylor were so excited to play with their cousins. Both their cousins, who are quite a bit older, are great about playing with them and they really get along spectacularly. We had 4-day passes to Disney so we spent majority of our time at the parks trying to do as many rides as we could before we gave out. Taylor was always the first to tap out and after day 1 would have been happy to just stay with Grandma at the hotel for the rest of the week but she was a trooper and stuck it out. It was nice that she was just tall enough (close enough that we had to make sure she wore her tennis shoes to make the cutoff) for a lot of the rides that the bigger kids wanted to go on and she was amazingly brave for a 3-year old. Ethan has no fear of most rides and was usually the one telling me there was nothing to be worried about.
Here we are waiting to go on the Tower of Terror ride at Hollywood Studios. For some reason Taylor decided that she didn't want to miss this one so she wouldn't go with Grandpa or her cousins. We really did try to talk her out of it but that child is stubborn beyond belief. In her defense she did follow through and stick with it until the end. She was absolutely terrified once it started dropping but she didn't cry or anything. I know I never would have done that as a kid so she must get it from Abe. Even Ethan would not sign up to do this ride again. Here Taylor is kissing Abe but it cracks me up that she covers his mouth just in case he tries to kiss her back (which she rarely allows).
Here Ethan and Taylor are working on their best "terrified faces" while we waiting in the REALLY long line. Just ignore all the sweat on us in every picture. It was pretty hot and humid the whole time. From the pictures that are taken on the ride this is not at all what "terrified" looks like in real life. The real thing is much more pathetic.
The hotel where we stayed was absolutely beautiful with several pools, a sandy beach, an indoor playplace for the kids, boat rentals, trails for walking. It was kind of sad that we were so busy with Disney that we didn't get to take full advantage of it. We did go to the pool one afternoon and the kids had a fun time playing.
Ethan loves being thrown high into the air by his dad.
My mom had requested long ago that we take some pictures of the cousins all together during this trip. And as always, that is easier said than done. First it meant finding a time before everyone got sweaty and tired at Disney and secondly it meant trying to get four sort of wild kids to look in remotely the same direction all at once. Maybe I should have looked more carefully when picking a location for our photo shoot. The thought of an alligator coming and eating a child really put a damper on my creative spirit (if I ever had one). The kids did try hard (after being bribed with candy). Now if only I had some fancy photo editing software that could move kids around to get the best picture of each of them in one then we would be good.
So after a long fun week in Orlando we started home to Texas. The kids have really been troopers on each of our long drives and the ride home was no different. We left at 3AM so we could make good distance on our 10-hour drive for Day 1while the kids slept and we stopped in New Orleans for the evening. We could have made it further but we thought it would be fun to explore this famous city. We set out in mid-afternoon to drive around downtown and check things out. Ethan was HILARIOUS about his dislike for this "unique" place. As we were driving down Boubon Street we were trying to explain that it was a pretty famous street that everyone knows about. He just kept saying "this is not a street, it is an alley, and it smells". I really couldn't dispute either statement and he was pretty adamate that he was NOT getting out of the car in this very unsafe place. He said "I think there is drug dealing going on here". I can't say I even knew that he knew that term but once again he could have been right. Once he started noticing things like a Hello "Kitty" t-shirt where the "K" was replaced by a "T" and didn't look like the "hello kitty" that we knew we decided that he probaby had the right idea about making our stop there short. But we can now say that we have seen it. As we were leaving town and heading to dinner I looked back to see Taylor messing up her hair that I had fixed. I told her that she was making her hair look crazy and Ethan said, under his breath, "she will fit right in". After our adventure we went to a delicious seafood place that was the best seafood I have had in years. We again got an early start on our last day of driving but thanks to a stupid move on my part we locked the keys in the car when we stopped for breakfast. That meant we spent a total of 4 hours in Carl's Jr. that morning trying to get the keys out. AAA was not at it best on that Sunday morning and who knew that Toyota does such a great job of making it hard to break into their cars. We could not have been happier to pull into our driveway and finally be back home after such a long time. I think I will probably not sign up for another 5-week "vacation" any time soon but it has been great to be home and getting back into the swing of things. We have played catch up all week but finally are starting to feel like life is back to normal. And since normal is life without Abe around much it is appropriate that he go off to Austin for the month for work just as we get home.
