Disney, Day 1: Epcot

The book suggests that you do no more than 2 days in a row before taking a day to rest.  I read this, and thought about it, but did what most people do and said "I only have so much time, I don't want to waste it sitting around doing nothing!"  So we planned for 2 days in the park, with a half day (for resting) before we did 2 more full days.  Let me tell you, plead with you:  DON'T DO MORE THAN 2 DAYS IN A ROW!!!  I'm serious people.  I bought a pedometer specifically for this trip.  Ironically, and unfortunately, I lost it after 2 days, but according to my pedometer, we did 8 miles the first day.  And 10 miles the second!!!  Ok, now that we covered that, we can move on....

Our first day at the parks was a Saturday.  I was prepared for this day to be pretty packed, because it was a weekend, but I really didn't think it was that bad (perhaps because it was February).  We chose to go to Epcot first based on what the book said.  If I were to go back, I would do things slightly differently.  I would have used Epcot as our half day and switched our full day to Hollywood Studios.  The book said you could not do Epcot in one day because it was geographically bigger than Hollywood Studios.  In our particular case, we didn't find Epcot as interesting once we got around to the back loop.  This is where all the different countries are.  These countries are kinda cool to look at, but the kids weren't all that thrilled.  They were mostly filled with food and shopping, and you can't eat EVERYWHERE you go, and we didn't want to spend a bazillion dollars.  So, this was our shortest day in the park.  And to be honest, we could have gone home even earlier than we did, had we planned better.

We arrived at the gates at least 30 minutes before opening.  Which meant there was a little bit of time to kill.  So why not take some pictures of excited kids?!?

 We don't really have a stroller anymore, so we borrowed one from a friend instead of renting.  This saved us some cash.  Kari was a real trooper, and she never actually rode in it.  Kaitlyn only rode a few times, and we frequently double stacked Kelsey and Dylan in the stroller.  While we didn't actually intend to push the kids everywhere, it served as a wonderful catch all for the cooler of food, souvenirs, and sweatshirts.  

  I was not prepared for how much time you spend away from the stroller though.  You frequently park them in stroller parking and leave them for hours at a time while you ride all the rides close by.  At first, I sorta left my purse hidden in the stroller because I didn't want to carry it, but that made me uncomfortable.  So the following days I cleaned out my purse of anything that couldn't be replaced, but still left the things I wanted access to in the park (baby wipes, Tylenol, bandaids, etc) and then felt much better about leaving it alone.  There was never any evidence that anyone ever touched our stuff, and everyone else was doing the same things we did.

Every ticket comes with the ability to schedule 3 Fast Passes a day (and more depending on when you use them and what is available afterwards).  You can make the reservations on an app with your phone, or through the website 30-60 days in advance.  And then, that information is linked to your Magic Band so you can just scan it as you walk through.  The book suggested (and I totally agree) that for the most popular and heavy traffic rides you have 2 options if you don't want to wait in line forever: 1) Ride it first thing in the morning, when less people are in the park and the lines are shorter.  Or 2) Schedule your fast pass for it later in the day.  

This was our first ride of the morning, and our first ride at Disneyworld ever: Soarin'!  We honestly had no idea what to expect, but it quickly became one of our favorites, and set the bar pretty high for the rest of the day.

 Um...  don't remember what this ride was on.  Finding Nemo or Crush's Adventure maybe?  But it was a cute one of my and my Kaitlyn, so, I thought I should post it.

 The book I bought also provided tour plans for the most efficient way to ride through the park.  And for the most part, we followed it.  With the Disney app, we could see wait times for everything all over the park, so sometimes we altered things a little bit.  I'm not going to bore you with a schedule of every single ride we rode, or what order we did it.  But at the end of the turtle ride, there were huge aquariums to go through.  And the kids would have stood around for hours watching all the animals. Like the manatee pictured below.

 Or the sea turtles.  I was eventually able to convince them that we could see aquariums else where, and that we needed to peel ourselves away from there to ride other rides.

Thankfully, it didn't take much convincing :)  We rode more rides.  We ended up a little bit frustrated when trying to find something for lunch.  We didn't realize the difference between fast food and sit down.  But we got the hang of it.  After lunch we walked through the back loop of Epcot where we toured many countries of the world.  I spent quite a bit of time in the English part, looking for tea cups and feel nostalgic.

And we had Gelato in Italy before we left to go home.  S&M had arrived that same day after having driven all night long.  So they lounged and used the pool a bit.  Once we got home, it was a quick, easy dinner (none of the kids were really hungry after a late, heavy lunch) and onto plans for the following day.

Disney!!! The Beginning

I told you I have zillions of pictures.  Ok, literally hundreds.  And I still don't really know how I am going to approach it.  But I have been putting it off for actual months now, and I guess I figure anything is better than nothing, no matter how unorganized it is, or how many zillion pictures it has.  So...  Here goes nothing!!!

First, a little back story.  Hubby and I knew each other in high school.  We went on our first date after being in the same class all year: an elective class that his ex girlfriend requested he take before they broke up mid year.  That class, chorus, went on a trip to Disneyworld.  So we went on a trip together after dating for, like 3 weeks, and hung out a majority of the trip.  After we got married, we always said we wanted to go back.  And once we had kids, we knew we wanted to try to hit that sweet spot where all of the kids would remember it, but still wouldn't be too old to think it wasn't cool.  Enter our 15 year wedding anniversary trip.  Again, we've been "planning" this trip for years.  As we got closer I bought this book online.  I also bought the official version, but I personally thought the unofficial version had more pertinent information.  Some of it is overkill (they review almost every single hotel and restaurant within a 15 min drive).  So I skipped over a lot of that.  But I did read most of the 864 pages and got quite a bit of information out of it.  And, while we invited several people to go with us on this trip (both sides of the family and good friends) only S&M were able to go with us.  Our trips were off by one day, but we really had so much fun!

We decided to go in February for a few reasons.  1st and probably most important: WEATHER!  If we were going to be spending all day, every day walking outside with tons of people, I wanted it to be as cool as possible.  2nd: Crowd control.  We didn't want to go during Christmas or Spring Break times.  We didn't want to have to spend a gazillion hours in line or pushing through crowds.  So, we did the unthinkable: We took the kids out of school for a week to go to Disney.  I know some people frown on this sort of thing, but it was cheaper, easier and funner.  And we let the teachers know weeks ahead of time and asked for work to take with us.  There was an 8 hour drive, both ways, so they would have plenty of time to stay up to date with work.  

The week before we left, I spent time laundering, packing, making piles, and shopping for food and snacks.  Friday morning I spent the morning loading up the car while hubby went to work to finish a few "quick" things and the kids went to half a day of school.  If I took them out at noon, it didn't count as an absence!  So, we were in the car, ready to drive about 1pm.  We also invested in a (decently inexpensive) portable DVD for each child, in addition to school work, tablets and books to keep them entertained (though we left the DVDs at home!!!  Thankfully, each child had one DVD in the player, so we cycled through 4...  phew!)  With the headphones, it was the quietest trip we have ever had.  It was amazing!

 Early on, I had suggested we rent a house to stay in.  Hotel rooms would have been cramped, and we would have had to share the pool with other guests.  This way, we got the pool to ourselves, had a fully stocked kitchen, and had bedrooms for everyone.  Plus, once the kids were in their beds, we could actually hang out in the family room together, regroup and make plans for the following day.  So, we drove 8 hours and moved into the house.  The following morning, we got ready to head to our first day at the parks!

One of the suggestions the book made, and I high agree and encourage if you are going to embark on this sort of thing, was to go early in the day.  Like, be at the gates 30-45 minutes before they open.  For us, this wasn't a huge deal.  My kids are early risers, and because it was technically "off season" they didn't open super early.  Because we arrived at the gate early, there would be a little bit of sitting around to be done, so my plan was this: make all breakfasts portable and eat while we waited.  (I can't take all the credit for this.  Again, it was a book suggestion).  So, literally all the kids had to do when they woke up was get dressed and brush their hair.  So easy!

We packed a cooler full of snacks to get us through the day.  We could have packed our own lunch, but chose not to.  I just wanted to have something to get us through those super hungry/grumpy times to make the day easier.  

We also chose to upgrade our tickets to Magic Bands.  It is a relatively small upgrade fee at $13/person, but of course you can pay more and do fancier things.  Again, totally worth it in my opinion.  All the tickets and reservation information is in a handy band that is on your body.  It made it totally easy for all the picture stuff too.  But we'll get into that later.  Some people complained that the bands were hard to work, but we never had an issue.  Kelsey could totally do it by herself.  And, at the end of the day, I collected all the bands and distributed them the following morning.  

Band check!

And that is how pretty much every morning started.  Packing the cooler, spraying the suntan lotion (yes, we totally still used suntan lotion in February), and eating in the car.  Because we got there so early, we usually got a pretty good parking spot.  Tomorrow, we'll journey into the actual parks!  Stay tuned!

Snapchat

Generally speaking, I don't love pictures of myself.  I prefer to be behind the lens, rather than in front of it.  But I may be training my children to be egotistical maniacs by taking pictures of them all the time...  I haven't decided if I feel badly about this.

And to feed their egos, I finally jumped on the bandwagon and downloaded Snapchat.  Most of the time I use it to entertain Kelsey.

 As you can plainly see.

 And, for some reason, because they aren't actually me, and they are supposed to look weird and malformed, sometimes I get some pretty great ones of myself.

 Not gonna lie though, sometimes the filters with make up built in are pretty great.

 And I can show Kaitlyn what she might look like once she moves out of the house.

 Kari has taken a few pictures.  But not nearly as many as Kelsey or Kaitlyn.

 And the filters change daily (I think), so there is almost always something to play with.

Even if it is weird. 

 Some days they are sponsored by certain things happening on TV or something else.  And no, I didn't actually put make up on Kelsey.  But I feel the need to be concerned as she grows up.

 And the day the unicorn thingy came out at Starbucks, there was this Lisa Frank-esque one available.

And who doesn't love a punky pig? Deer?  We are undecided.

 Me and my girl, hanging out in the car during Tae Kwon Do.

 Because...  Car Selfies.  #AmIRight?

 And I just leave this one here.

I'm pretty sure this is a throwback Thursday kinda thing.  Me, in middle school.

The End.

Jeff Dun-Ham

One of our friends invited us to go on a triple date a while back, and we bought tickets to go to Jeff Dunham!  I had seen several "specials" on TV, and I knew that we enjoyed him.  But, word to the wise: While I still enjoyed his jokes generally, when he isn't censored, he isn't exactly TV appropriate.  Just an FYI :)

He opened up with one of our favorite old grumps, Walter.

I didn't bring my big expensive camera, of course.  I doubt it would be allowed even if I wanted to.  And I am too lazy to try to figure out all the setting on my cell phone.  So, this is the best I could get!

He brought out a new puppet that I hadn't seen before.  I forget his name, but it was an Irish baby who told some funny, but very non PC jokes.

He brought out Jose Jalepeno on a Stick, whom he hasn't used in quite a while so that he could try out a bit that he said he was thinking of including in his next special.  No audience had ever heard the bit before, and he begged everyone to not record it or post it (even though we weren't supposed to be recording anything anyway) because he said he still wanted to perfect it a bit before it became public.  So, that was kinda cool :)

And then he finished the night with everyone's favorite terrorist: Achmed :)

We rounded out the night by going out for cheesecake, which was pretty delicious.

And, can I just say: this live in babysitter thing is pretty great?!?!  The show was on a Thursday night.  We ate dinner before we left, and made sure the kids were bathed and jammied.  They played on tablets for about an hour and then put themselves to bed, with Kari being in charge the whole time.  It was pretty great!  Maybe there is a reason to have multiple kids after all....  they can babysit each other!

And Happy Birthday to my favorite older sister Pickle!!!  The Bestest Birthday Queen I know!

Kari's First Temple Trip

In our church, once the kids turn 12, they have the chance to partake in a special worship ceremony at the LDS temples.  Kari finally got to go in April, even though she turned 12 back in December.

And I had the chance to go with her!  Her youth leaders are super sweet, and we really like them.

On this particular trip, only one gentleman was able to go, and he wanted to take a great picture.  It appears I missed the shot by about 2.5 seconds, but still, it was a fun memory :)

I'm super glad Kari got to go :)

And that I got to go with her!  Love my oldest child!

Also, Happy Anniversary to my little seester and her hubby!

Hoppy Easter!

This year, Easter was pretty low key for us.  But I made sure I snapped a few pictures of the kids outside, because they generally looked cute :)

This is what happens when I ask Kelsey to smile at the moment.  All teeth, closed eyes.

In our church, members of the congregation are asked to present from the pulpit every week.  I was asked to speak on Easter Sunday.  Thankfully, I think it went ok, but I hate public speaking!

My little rabbits were getting tired of the picture taking.

They just wanted to go inside and hunt some eggs and get some candy.

We've spoken with our Easter Bunny and arranged for him to come after church.  It makes the morning run a bit smoother, and we aren't late for church.  But their baskets are waiting for them when they wake up.  So, the kids came home and changed into their comfy clothes....

And got ready to hunt.

And for a sugar high.   Can't forget that part.

Shooting with the Cricket

Later that weekend, we went out back and shot with the kids.  While hubby has purchased a kids sized shot gun, the kids don't really love to shoot it.  I can't blame them.  That thing kicks like a mule!  But they DO enjoy shooting the .22 rifle, which we call the little Cricket in honor of MIB.  We let grandpa give it a try, but it appears to be a bit underwhelming for him.

Thats ok though.  We mainly got it out for the kids to use.  

Kaitlyn, my child who is scared of big noises, actually really enjoys the cricket.  For one, her personalized ear protection (notice hers are pink, and Kelsey's were purple) keeps the noise from being too loud.  Though, to be honest, the .22 isn't all that loud.

But secondly, I suspect she likes it because she is actually a pretty decent shot.  Not a speed shooter, but....  she could be a sniper maybe :)

We tried out a new position or two with Dylan.  I love that he looks surprised :)

Ready....  Aim.....

Fire!!!

He isn't a bad shot either :)

And then it was time for Kelsey.  Who wears snow boots everywhere.  Amen.

Who, this time around, took a particular interest in loading the gun.

Remember how this works?  You look through this thing here....

Line it up here and pull the trigger!

Most of the time, she didn't hit anything.  And that was fine with her.  She just wanted to shoot like her siblings did.  But, again, the joy in that is that she could load the gun a few times.

Its still a little bit big for her....  But, I'm glad she enjoys it.

Yay Kelsey!  No hits, but lots of fun :)

Kaitlyn took a second turn and did even better!

We also shot my handgun a little bit.  

Pa's house.  Police your own brass, but have fun!