Stowellzone

Mason has one more year of preschool before heading into the big Kindergarten!  Crazy!  He really loves this school and last year he grew in leaps and bounds so we love it, too!  He’s really excited to learn to read and is asking all the time how to spell things and trying to sound out words.  It’s really fun to watch him learn.  He was really excited to see his friends again, too.

Getting Ready

Dropping Him Off!

And the pick up…he loved it!

He also started another year of soccer.  He’s on the same team as last year and was excited to see his friends and coach again!  They have some fun orange and blue colors this year and they picked the team name “The Bulls” this year!

And we are off to Disney World!!   It is really amazing how incredibly huge this place is.  It consists of 4 main parks: Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Disney Hollywood Studios, and Epcot.  Again, if we would have realized how much there was to see, we would have stayed for more days, but we did the best we could.   We kind of decided that we wouldn’t do too many character meet and greets.  We weren’t sure how the kids would react to them and didn’t want to waste time to have them just cry and cling to us.  Plus, we can do all that at Disneyland, whenever we go there.

The first stop was to Magic Kingdom.  We knew we would spend an entire day here.  The first thing we knew we had to do was go and see Rapunzel.  As soon as the park opened we ran right there and only had wait about 20 minutes before we made our little girls dream come true!  Kinley loves Rapunzel so much and we knew there was one character we had to see.  It was worth the trip to Flordia, just for this.

 

She was seriously so happy!  We then rode some rides.

Saw some parades.  These were great cause the kids got to see all the characters.

This just proves how much we had been doing, Mason never falls asleep anywhere!  This was a nice break for us.

More rides and shows

Waited for a dinner table and watched the kids play.  Normally Kinley’s hair is pretty straight, but the humidity made it go really curly, it was so cute!

Watched the light parade and then the amazing fireworks over Cinderella’s Castle.  They were amazing!

Kinley loved this one, you can see Rapunzel at the top with her hair coming down the castle

 

The next day our plan was to go to Animal Kingdom for half the day and then Disney Hollywood Studios the rest of the day, but we loved Animal Kingdom so much we ended up spending most the day there and then just went to DHS for the evening.

Digging for Dinosaur bones

The only other character we talked to, just because he had just got there and no one was in line yet.  Just as I had predicted, Mason wouldn’t go near him and Kinley walked up, gave him a high five then didn’t want anything to do with him.  So glad we didn’t spend any more time meeting characters!!

 

A very cool safari ride that I maybe shouldn’t have gone on being pregnant and all, but I just held my belly so it didn’t bounce so much!

A few family pictures…don’t we look tired!!

The prizes from here were that big dinosaur Mason is holding and a Nemo for Kinley.  Mason loved the dinosaur ride even though it scared him a little!  We hurried over to Hollywood Studios only to find that most of the shows we had wanted to see were done for the day.  The main ride I wanted take the kids on was the Toy Story ride and the line was 2 hours long!!  We hadn’t waited very long in lines, so we decided to take our kids while Kay, Roger, and Ethan went on some bigger rides and then saved us seats for Fantasmic.

But we walked out of the ride to an absolute down pour of rain!!  Luckily our stroller was covered so it wasn’t too wet.  The first thing we did when we got to Florida was buy poncho’s because we had heard it did this a lot.  So we packed up those poncho’s every day in preparation and the only time it rained is when we weren’t together!  We got a hold of poor Kay and Roger and met up with them.   They were completely soaked!  And to make it worse, all the rides that they wanted to go on had too long of lines, so they had spent all that time saving us fantastic seats for the show, only to see a few fireworks go off before the rain started and they canceled it!  While it was really sad, it was only thing that had gone wrong on the trip so we just laughed and chalked it up to good memories!

For our last day, we went to Epcot and then left early to go to Tree’s house for dinner.  I wish we could have seen more of Epcot, we didn’t even really walk around too much. It was the hottest day and there was no shade and everyone was tired.  We went on a few rides and saw a few shows.

Don’t the kids look so happy!!  We ended the trip having a great time with family and just relaxing at their amazing house!!  The kids loved swimming and playing with all the toys.

It was seriously a wonderful vacation!  We got home later than planned, packed everything up, went to bed just past midnight and then got up at 4:00 am to get to the airport and fly home.  Luckily the kids crashed soon after we got on the plane and slept the entire way home.   It was an incredible trip and adventure (especially being 7 months pregnant) and I’m so grateful we had the opportunity to go!!

 

 

 

After 2 exhausting days at theme parks and knowing that we were heading to Disney World for 3 days in a row, we were all looking very forward to a day just relaxing on the beach.  Jeremy’s cousin Tree has a beach house on Daytona Beach that he has every 2 weeks and he just happened to have it that week we were there, so we drove down there to spend the day.  For the first few hours, Tree and his family were there and we had a great time visiting with them.  This was my first time see the Atlantic Ocean!  The sand was gorgeous and the weather was perfect.  The kids were a little apprehensive at first with the waves, but by the end, they were loving them!  There is also a pool right when you walk out of the building and it was really nice to go to the beach, “wash” off the sea water in the pool and then head upstairs.

 

This is Tree’s wife and their 2 little adorable girls!!

Ethan did a good job!

 

I can’t believe I’m posting a picture of the beached whale…but I am!

A view from their condo

It was an awesome day, it was so great to just sit and relax and for once, I wasn’t hot!!!

 

 

Sea World!!  I always liked Sea World when I was a kid and was excited to go to the one in Florida.  Since we had such a late night the night before, we slept in a little then headed to Sea World.  I was excited for a little more relaxing day watching shows and getting wet.  Although we didn’t get as wet as I thought we would and there wasn’t much shade there, so this was one of our hotter days.

This was Kinley’s and I think everyone else’s favorite show, the dolphin’s!!  They are seriously so amazing.  Kinley loved that there was a dolphin princess!

 

During one of the Shamo show’s, Mason, Ethan, and I went down to the splash zone to get wet.  Sadly for some reason, our little section was missed a lot and we only got a few splashes!

A place to get wet

A few rides

We ended the night with another Shamo show and some fireworks!  The kids left with some cool dolphin necklaces that flashed all different colors.

For our first full day in Florida, we decided to go to Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure.  Now, when we planned this trip, we didn’t realize how massive all the parks were, so we only had one day for these 2 parks and we quickly discovered it would be hard to cover 1 of them in 1 day!!  The first thing we did is run and head right to Harry Potter.  We had heard that the main ride there is hard to get on, so we went there first, only to find that it was closed!!  We did get to walk through the castle, which we pretty cool, but couldn’t do the ride.  There was a good sized roller coaster next to it called Flight of the Hippogriff and Mason wanted to go on it.  I was a little apprehensive, because he’d never been on one so big, but much to my surprise, he loved it!  Roger and I just hung out with Kinley while they went on it.

Next, the “older kids” aka Kay, Jer, and Ethan, went on some bigger rides while Roger and I took the little kids to The Cat in the Hat place.  I could actually do some stuff here!

McKinley loved any carousel we came in contact with during this trip.  Here’s the first one!

Ethan, not so much!  Look at the excitement!!!

Back to the Future car and train

The kids favorite areas!! It was so hot that we stopped at these little water parks everywhere we could.

We saw some shows

At the end of the day, we went back to Harry Potter so we could take more time looking around.

The main thing I wanted to do there was get some butter beer.  It tasted a lot like cream soda and was pretty dang good!  We had decided that we would get something from each park each day.  We walked away from these parks with wands for Jer and each of the kids and I got a chocolate frog! It was a very long day, but so much fun!

I’m breaking these posts up because it would be 2 miles long if I didn’t!  This year, we had the awesome experience to go to Orlando, Florida for a vacation.  We had been hoping to make it Disneyland this year, but between the busy summer and the baby (I really didn’t feel like driving to Cali being pregnant) we decided it wasn’t in the cards this year.  Then out of nowhere, Jeremy’s parents invited us to go on their trip with them to Disney World and all the other adventures Orlando offers.  I think at first we were both thinking no, with the added expense of the plane tickets with everything else, it just seemed like too much money and another thing I wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle while pregnant.  Then they mentioned that they were staying at a family members house (who only there a few times a month) for free and it sounded a little better, I mean no hotels, that would help the bill.  Then after talking again for a bit they said if we would come, they would buy our plane tickets!!  Jer and I both kind of looked at each other, knowing we would probably never get this opportunity again and said, “ok, let’s do it!”  So the planning began!  We found out after that this is probably one of the worst times to go, it tends to be a lot busier in the summer and the Florida is extremely hot and humid during July and August.  I even had a friends who lives there tell me, “You know, this the time of year when Florida residents leave to get away from the heat!”  I was pretty nervous about that part because not only do I not do well when I’m pregnant and hot, but McKinley really doesn’t like it!  So I made sure we were stocked with shorts and thin shirts and tried to be positive!  We got a book from the library called “The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World” that was huge, but packed full of good information.  It even had a section just for pregnant woman, listing what rides you can ride and what you should avoid!  I was happy to see that at least at Disney World, I wasn’t going to be banned from too many rides.  It also had plans that told you step by step what rides to go one and what to hit first, when to get fast passes, and where decent places to eat where.  Knowing that the parks were huge, it was nice to have this when we only had a short time there.

Knowing this was my kids first time on and airplane, I was a little nervous!!  Luckily it was a non stop flight, but I was worried about what they would do for 4 hours.  I jammed each of the backpacks full of fun stuff to do and got all packed up and ready to go!  My parents were going to keep Bogee at their house for us and my mom was nice enough to come up and and take us all to the airport so we wouldn’t have to leave a car there.  She was planning on staying here a few days to study for a test that she was taking up in Salt Lake, but came up early to bring me some suitcases and take us up….so nice of her, she’s  the best mom!!  We got the kids up early Thursday morning and get them ready to go.  We checked our carseats curbside, each grabbed our carry-on’s (I managed to get all our stuff in 3 carry-on bags, then we each had a personal bag to go under our seats!) and got ready to board!  The kids were excited!!  Ok, I was really excited, too, I had never been further east than Ohio and I love the ocean and couldn’t wait to see it!  Here we are at the airport, waiting for the plane!

They actually did really good during take-off, we had warned them that we will go really fast and the go up in the air.  They weren’t scared at all and thought it was so fun!  McKinley had one short meltdown on the plane, but I think just cause she was bored, so we moved seats around and got out different toys and she was fine.  She was pretty nervous as we were coming closer to landing because she could just see all the water around us and kept saying “Don’t land in the water!!” over and over until we had to move her away from the window and shut it for a minute.  They did great during the landing too!  I was so proud of them!

This was during her landing in the water panic mode

We had rented a mini van for a vehicle there and we were waiting a really long time to get it, so they upgraded us to an SUV for free!!  It was a lot more money for the SUV and we figured that would give us even more space…until we saw it and realized it wasn’t an extended SUV and suddenly we had a lot less room than we would have in the van!  With all the luggage and the stroller, we were pretty jammed in there, so luckily the house was only a few miles from the airport!  We unloaded everything at the house, looked around, and then headed off to the store to get some food for the week!  There was a pool at the house, but we didn’t really want our kids swimming with no floaties or anything to keep them up so we made them wait until we got home…then it was so late by the time we got back from the store, cooked and ate dinner that I just said, sorry, no swimming tonight, we have a super early morning and we all went to bed instead to get ready for the next days adventures!!