Our Orlando Trip Day 1: Disney's Magic Kingdom

Danny had a conference in Orlando this past week, so we decided to fly out there a few days before his conference started and have a family vacation. We decided to stay at La Quinta because they offered free breakfast and shuttle service to both Disney and Universal (the theme parks that we decided to go to.) It wasn't the nicest of hotels, but we didn't do much more than sleep in the hotel anyways, so it was sufficient for our needs. The shuttle service, however, could use some improvement but I'll save that story for later. Here the girls are waiting for the shuttle in the morning.
The Magic Kingdom only has two ways into the park from where we were. The monorail or the ferryboat. We decided to do the ferry in the morning and take the monorail back at the end of the day(we ended up doing the ferryboat at the end of the day because we were familiar with it and knew that we could walk onto it without folding our stroller up). Here are the girls on the ferry ready for a fun-filled day. (We have been talking about this trip since March so they were pretty excited to finally be at Disney World.)

Out of all the characters in the park, this was the only one that we actually waited in line to get a picture with. We actually tried to get one with the Little Mermaid too, but the line had closed already when we got there. We did the 45 minute wait to meet three princesses at Disneyland last year, so we didn't even give the girls that option. Danny had an app on his phone that gave us the wait times for all of the lines in the park and that one was consistantly 45 minutes or more. The girls do love the Peter Pan movie so they were excited about meeting him.

The first ride we went on was the cars in Tomorrowland. We ended up riding it twice because there was no wait. Here is Ashley driving her car.

The camera stayed in the bag most of the rest of the day as we were busy having fun. I did pull it out once in the afternoon to get a shot of each of the girls on the teacups.

We were inside of the gates when the park opened and got to watch the little street show that they must do at the beginning of every day. We chose to go on a day that the park was open until 9pm for the main street electrical parade followed with fireworks. The girls enjoyed every minute of the day(except the hot minutes where they had to walk). We did bring a stroller from home, but it was only a single stroller so there was always a fight between them about who go to ride. Danny and I usually ended up trading off carrying the other one. The favorite rides of the day were Big Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, and the Peter Pan Ride(that was Alyssa's). Our only regret of the day was relying on our Hotel shuttle to pick us up. We were at the shuttle stop 20 minutes before pick up time and were told two different times to wait "10 minutes" for the next shuttle. We didn't end up getting on a shuttle until at least an hour after our pick up time (2 1/2 hours after the park had closed). Oh, and did I mention that both girls were asleep before we even got out of the park. Needless to say, we opted to drive our rental car and pay for parking on the next two days at Universal. The $15 was well worth the convenience of leaving the park when we were ready to leave.

Day 2 - Universal Studios Florida

On Day 2, we went to Universal Studios. We decided to do 2 Universal Parks and 1 Disney Park because it was a lot cheaper. Here the girls are in front of the rotating universal ball. We actually got a good shot on the first try.
Right away, the girls got to meet Dora and Diego.

They also got to meet Spongebob. They don't like Spongebob, but there wasn't a line to get a picture with him so we took advantage.

Universal Studios had a lot of play areas for the kids. One of them was called Feifel's playland. There was this ball pit there.(I haven't seen a ball pit in so long. Most places have gotten rid of them.) Feifel's playland also had a waterslide that you go down in a raft. They loved being able to do that by themselves.

Another playland was Curious George themed. It had this ball room that had hundreds of little foam balls that you could feed into different things and watch them shoot out. The girls both liked this cannon blaster. We spent over an hour of the day in this one room.

The girls were able to go on all but two of the rides. We took advantage of the play areas at the end of the day and let the girls play while we took turns going on the other two rides. Universal had single rider lines which made our wait times really short when we were going by ourselves. That was really nice. The girls had a lot of fun here, but when we asked them whether they liked Disney better or Universal Studios, their reply was Disney. We asked them why and Alyssa said that Disney didn't have any scary rides (like Jaws-where the shark attacks the boat we are sitting in and Disaster-where they made it seem like we were in a subway during an earthquake.)

Day 3- Universal Islands of Adventure

The girls are all geared up for the third day in a row of amusement park fun. This was taken in the hotel room before we left that morning.
Islands of Adventure was split into themed "islands." There different "islands" were marvel superheroes, toon-something, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Dr. Seuss land, and one more that had a Greek Mt. Olympus type look. This picture was obviously taken in Jurassic Park. There was a boat ride in this area of the park that was patterned after the tour in the movie that the girls said they liked. They admitted to us after we got on it for the second time that they didn't like it so much because it was scary.

I was the only one in the group excited about the Harry Potter island. It was kind of fun feeling like I stepped into the set of the movie.

I even got to try some butterbeer. So delicious.

The girls obviously loved Dr. Seuss land the most. Their favorite ride was the Cat in the Hat ride. They also enjoyed the "one fish..." ride and the "If I ran the Zoo" play area complete with water toys to soak themselves in (they played there while I went back to ride the Harry Potter ride alone).

They Caro-seuss-el was kind of fun too.

We had a lot of fun on our trip and we were so glad that we could take the girls to Orlando and watch them having so much fun. Besides the amusement parks, we also enjoyed swimming in the hotel pools and eating at fun places (like the McDonald's with the largest playland in the world). Florida was really hot and humid and we were happy to return to the dryer climate in Utah. It is also nice to get back into a routine again.

First Day of School - a week late

Last Monday, Alyssa started school. She is going to American Heritage, for those who are familiar with the school. For those who aren't, it is an LDS Private school across the street from the Mount Timpanogas Temple in American Fork. Here is little sister wishing her a good first day.

This is the front of the school. Can you tell how excited she is to be going to school.
We feel fortunate to have Grandpa Wheeler working at the school and checking up on her every once in awhile.

Danny and I have worked out a schedule for dropping her off and picking her up since it is a 20 minute drive for us, and there is no bus service. Danny takes her M/W/F and I take her T/Th. I also pick her up everyday. You can arrange carpools with other parents, but we didn't know if anyone would be interested in carpooling with us just having a half day Kindergartner so we didn't sign up for that. Since the first day of school was a Monday, Danny was the one who took her.

At Meet-Your-Teacher she was able to choose which seat she wanted to sit in. I tried to talk her into one that was in the middle and closer, but she wanted the back corner. Here she is doing her first assignment.

Alyssa's class has 18 kids in it and only 5 of them are girls. I don't know if there are just more girls her age or if it was just the way things worked out when they were deciding which kids to put in what class. She comes home from school excited to do her homework and to tell me all of the fun things that she got to do that day. We feel fortunate that she is able to attend American Heritage and we hope that it continues to be a good experience for her.