I'm not sure why we haven't posted about this yet, but we took a trip to Florida the first week and a half of March. My Grandma turned 90 on the 2nd, so everyone came out to Florida to celebrate. My Aunt threw a great party and everyone had lots of fun. It was great to see my family again. I hadn't seen my family that lives in Florida for quite a while. I'm glad we were able to all get together for my wonderful Grandma. We took a bunch of family photos; here are the ones with our family:
This is my immediate family:
This is the whole family:
We were able to do a lot of things while in Florida. I don't have pictures for everything though. We blessed Jack while there so my parents and Nana could see one of our kids get blessed. Gary has the picture for this. We unfortunately forgot our cameras on this trip, so all photos are from my dad and a few from Gary's phone.
On Monday we went to the Zoo in Tampa. The kids had lots of fun seeing the animals and riding the rides they had. Jack slept the whole time we were there. Tuesday we went to Clearwater beach. The water was quite chilly, so we mostly played in the sand:
On Wednesday Gary and James went with my parents and sister Melissa to a Nationals spring training game. I think James quite enjoyed that. While they were there I went with Grace, Jack, my sister Heather, and brother-in-law Scott to the Aquarium. Grace really didn't like the lobsters, but enjoyed everything else. I think here favorite might have been the huge sea turtle. They had a little penguin show that was right in front of one of their huge tanks. They let the little kids sit up in the front with their parents, so that's what we did. In the tank was the big turtle and every time he went where she couldn't see him she started screaming and crying about where did the turtle go. I tried as hard as I could to get her to be quiet so she didn't ruin the show for everyone. Two year olds can be a bit trying at times. Jack slept the entire time we were there, so he was wonderful.
Thursday morning we drove over to Orlando and went to Universal Islands of Adventure. We had such a fun time! The park really wasn't that crowded, so that made it nice. The kids loved the Dr. Seuss area. We didn't get a picture of it, but Grace and James were giving hugs and kisses to the different characters. Here are some pictures:
Gary and I's favorite part was Harry Potter World. It was really fun! We got to go on the main Hogwarts ride twice. Just waiting in line was really neat, they have so many things throughout Hogwarts that I loved. I actually wanted the line to slow down a bit. I wish I had more time to go in some of the shops though. The kids were treated with some candy that Grandma and Grandpa got them from Honeydukes.
Grace took a nap while we went through the Jurassic Park area. Gary and I went on the ride which had no line because it was kind of a chilly day for Florida. We're from Utah though, so the 60 degree weather didn't stop us from wanting to go on it and getting soaked. James got to play in their little play ground area.
We also went to where all the super hero stuff is. I think the Spiderman ride was a little too rough for James, but he insisted on going since he loves Spiderman. He didn't complain about it, but he also didn't want to go again. The kids loved going on their Storm version of the teacups. We went twice while we were waiting for grandma and grandpa to do Spiderman and they laughed and laughed. After that we took turns going on the Hulk coaster and the kids got a chance to go back to Dr. Seuss while Gary and I ran back to go on the Harry Potter ride again. It's too bad the park closed at 7pm because I would have liked to do a few more things. It was tons of fun though!
We spent the night in a very nice 3 bedroom suite and then got up to go to the Magic Kingdom on Friday. We had lots of fun there too of course. We were able to go on pretty much all the rides we wanted to. The only thing I regret is not knowing that you had to go to the new Beast's Castle for lunch if you wanted to be able to see the inside of it. They were all booked up for dinner, which is when we planned to eat there.
It was a little more crowded at Disney but still not too bad. The longest line we waited in was probably only 30 minutes because we grabbed the fast passes for the ones with the longest lines. We were only able to meet a few of the characters because the lines for them were quite long. So we got to see Goofy, Donald, and Ariel. We also saw Gaston but didn't bother to meet him since the kids didn't know who he was. We saw most characters in the parades that we caught. Here are pictures from the ones we met (the Ariel ones aren't good quality because I didn't have a camera when we met her, so I took a picture of the Photopass pictures that Disney took):
They kept the park open until 11pm that night, so the last few hours we hit a few more rides that didn't have any lines and were still open. The kids were exhausted of course, but they were good about it. The last ride they went on was Aladdin's carpets. They had a good time and loved that the camel spit on Grandma and Grandpa as we were walking away.
We had so much fun at the parks! I'm so thankful that my parents, sister Heather, and brother-in-law Scott were so good to help us with the kids. They waited outside many times so we could go on the big kid rides and also took the kids on many rides. So thank you again!
The next day we were all supposed to fly home, but our flight got cancelled because of a Denver snow storm. So we got to stay two extra days! Gary wasn't as excited about that because he had to miss more work, but we still had fun spending a little extra time with Nana and my Aunt, Uncle, and cousins. We flew back home on Monday and the kids were quite exhausted. James didn't want to leave Florida, so he kind of protested when we got to the airport. Unfortunately the flights they were able to get us on were terrible. We flew twice as long as was necessary because they had us going all the way to Seattle. Oh well, we made it and the kids were quite good considering how long we were on planes (I think it was almost 9 hours total on the planes, that's not including the layovers).
It was such a fun vacation and I'll forever remember the time we spent with my family! I'm so grateful for my Aunt for inviting everyone out and putting on a great party for Nana. She took real good care of us while we there and now I'm really wanting to do it again sometime soon (even though I know it might be a while)! Oh, I almost forgot...Jack slept wonderfully on this trip. He slept all night long for more than half of the trip. The days he didn't sleep all night were still a good 6 or 7 hours stretch. It was awesome and better than he was sleeping at home!
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