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.

Harvest time

We can't eat them fast enough. Any creative ideas?
(These were all picked within the past 4 days, the tomatoes within the past 2 days. We already have a full batch of fresh salsa in the fridge, and 4 loaves of zuccini bread/chocolate zuccini bread).

Kids Camp (Princess Party)

A couple of weeks ago, a couple of young women in our Ward put on what they called a Kids Camp. I think a more appropriate word for it would have been a Princess Party. The girls got to dress up in their prettiest princess clothes and go to a house with a bunch of other little girls and do princess related things. They played games like kiss the prince(instead of pin the tail on the donkey) and find the lost slipper. They got their nails painted, decorated tiaras, made necklaces, decorated castle-shaped sugar cookies, and had a tea party. Both Alyssa and Ashely were so excited to go and when I picked them up they sounded like they had a lot of fun.
The girls had a dentist appointment the day before we went to Lagoon. It was Ashley's first and she did so well. She even let them clean her teeth and do x-rays. Alyssa let them do x-rays and got up on the chair to let them clean her teeth, but then jumped right off as soon as the girl turned on the polisher. I don't understand why she is so scared of the dentist. Unfortunately the x-rays showed that she had more cavities. So we had to go back to the dentist and have her put to sleep in order to fill the cavities. Now we have upped the brushing and flossing routine another step(meaning morning and night with no exceptions, with a prescribed fluoride toothpaste, electric toothbrushes, and daily fluoride pills) to see if we can have a more successful dentist visit 6 months from now.
On a happier note, we are enjoying our last week of summer as Alyssa will start school a week from today. She is so excited to go to Kindergarten and make new friends.

Lagoon

Since Danny has had to travel so much this year for work, he hasn't had many chances to take vacation days. He decided that while he still only had one employee in the office that he would take a day off last Thursday so that we could go to Lagoon together as a family(for anyone who doesn't know, Lagoon is the only amusement park in Utah, at least that I know of). The girls were so excited to go and it was so fun to see their excitement throughout the day as they got to go on different rides. I didn't pull out the camera nearly enough since I didn't get a single picture of Danny. Here is the only one with me in it.

Most of my pictures were taken during the 2 hours we spent in Kiddie Land. The girls rode everything in there at least once. Here they are on the swings.

The car ride, which they later did again driving their own cars.

A helicopter ride.

And of course, the roller coaster--Pretty much the only one in the park that Ashley could ride. We did find one big roller coaster that she could go on later in the day. They are in the front and I love their faces in this picture. They just look like they are having so much fun.

This boat ride didn't look very exciting, but the kids loved ringing those bells. There was quite the meltdown from Ashley when the ride was over because Alyssa didn't let her ring it at all the whole time they were on the little boat. During the ride, I was so concentrated on how much Alyssa was ringing the bell, it didn't even occur to me to tell her to give her sister a turn.

Lagoon also has a small water park in it, so during the hottest hours of the afternoon, we went over to that and splashed around in the really cold water. The girls were too small to go on any of the water slides, but they did enjoy the lazy river and the kiddie area with smaller water slides. Unorturnately, the sun went behind a big cloud just as we were finishing up with applying sunscreen and didn't come back out until just after we had put our normal clothes on again. With the sun behind the cloud, the girls were freezing every time we left the water.

We opened the park at 11am and left about 20 minutes before closing (which was at 10 pm). We had a short thundershower come through between 8 and 9 pm that closed down some of the bigger rides. We couldn't ride most of them anyways, so it didn't effect us. The rain didn't bother us either since we were all wet from a couple of water rides that the girls wanted to go on.

It was a fun day and we were glad that we went. We just wish that some of the height limits for the bigger rides were less. We also wish that we didn't spend so much time waiting in line. Lagoon isn't quite like Six Flags and the Disney Parks when it comes to crowd control and moving people on and off of the rides quickly. But the tickets are probably half the price too, so I guess I can't complain.

The Happenings of Late

I've been neglecting our blog lately. It hasn't been intentional, I've just had a lack of pictures and time/motivation to do it. I looked on the camera yesterday and found that I had a few things on there to catch up on. So instead of doing a bunch of differnt posts, I decided to lump them all together into a really long post about what we've been up to in the past month. When we moved to Utah, we all got a new hair stylist - Aunt Shannon (Danny's sister). After Alyssa, Danny, and I all got haircuts, Ashley did not want to be left out of the fun. So we let Shannon cut her hair also (I had been trying to talk her out of it for fear that once we cut it, she would loose her curls). I thought it was Ashley's first haircut, so I had Danny take a bunch of pictures of it. When I went to tape some of her hair into her baby book, I noticed that there was already some hair in there, so we must have done a simple haircut in the past that I didn't remember. Ashley did really well for her haircut and was so excited to have it done. And I'm happy that she still has her beautiful curls.
I made some new hair bows for the girls a few weeks ago that the girls were pretty excited about. One day they were upstairs playing dress-up and then came down to show me how pretty they looked. I had a good laugh and then grabbed our camera.

Danny's parents gave us their old fire pit, so we finally tried it out. This was our third attempt to use it. The first time it started raining about 5 minutes after we got the fire going. The second time it started raining before we even lit the fire. This time, there was no rain to ruin the roasting and smore's fun.

We took a trip down to Phoenix last week. Danny had a conference there so we went with him and visited my brother's family. We also stopped in Henderson on the way down there and stayed with my sister. We had a nice evening visiting with them. Once in Arizona, the girls enjoyed playing with their cousins, going swimming in their swimming pool, and sleeping in the same room as the two girls closest in age to them. They didn't enjoy how hot it was there. None of us were happy about the small head injury Alyssa got less than an hour after getting to my brother's house. She fell off of a very large ball and hit their ping pong table on the way down. She put a gash in her head that had to be stapled up (with two little staples). Danny was fortunately around that night and spent three hours in urgent care with her. It put a damper on the first 24 hours we were there which had to remain swimless by order of the doctor. We made up for it the rest of the week by swimming twice a day.

The one problem with going on vacation is that we came back to these.

They are so big that we don't quite know what to do with them. I used a third of the zucchini to make bread, used another third of it for dinner that night, and I guess the rest of it will be used tonight. We love that our garden is finally producing delicious food.

Some other pictureless happenings:

My parents came through town on their annual "theater tour" as they call it and stayed with us for a night right before our trip to Phoenix. It was fun to see them and play some One High (that is the game of choice on my side of the family).

I signed Ashely up for a two day a week Preschool in American Fork. I was lucky enough to find one that starts 10 minutes after Alyssa starts school in the morning and finishes 30 minutes before Alyssa is done. I'm looking forward to the two days a week that I will have in order to run errands, excercise without kids, or just read if I choose.

Danny and I celebrated our 8th Wedding Anniversary while we were in Arizona. It happened to be on the one day that we didn't get to see each other at all. However, we celebrated before we went by going to an event called "Taste of the Valley." It was an event where different vendors from all over Utah Valley come to one place and let you sample something off of their menu. We paid $10 each and left so full that we thought we would explode. Some of the food was good and some of it not so much. We learned which places never to try on our own. We are also celebrating again in a couple of weeks by going to see "The Sound of Music" up at Sundance. We are looking forward to that also. I am so thankful for meeting Danny 8 1/2 years ago and for being lucky enough to be married to him. I couldn't ask for a better husband and Father to my sweet girls.