Reason #45386 That We Are Crazy

Also known as the “Last Minute Trip to Orlando”

Sans children!

Okay, backstory. So because John spent pretty much all of his vacation days horribly sick while the rest of us were in CA, they became sick days, which meant he still had vacation days to use for actual vacation. Yay! As a consolation prize of sorts, John’s parents gave us a generous amount of money to spend on a vacation that John would be present for. ;) With my mom only having a few days left this summer to watch the kids for us, we planned a quick trip to Orlando to go to Universal Studios (pronounced HARRY POTTER WORLD!!) and Disney World for 3ish days about 2 weeks before it actually happened. Whew!

It was really fun though, even if we always seem to have unlucky things happen to us (more on that later) ;)

After almost being unable to redeem our prepaid tickets (one of those unlucky things – but we got it sorted out eventually) We spent a day at Universal and saw all the awesome Harry Potter stuff!
We had lunch at the Leaky Cauldron…
Rode on the Hogwarts Express (!!!!)
And generally basked in the gloriousness that is Harry Potter. (Okay, I was the one basking, John was probably laughing at me) ;)

So fun!

We spent day 2 at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom.
We used one of our fastpasses to get prime seating for the afternoon parade (the parades are one of my favorite things about going to Disney)
We loved that Merida was riding on a giant set of bagpipes!
We rode of a couple of our favorite rides – Pirates of the Caribbean and the Jungle Cruise. We also did the Monster’s Inc. Laugh floor, which was really fun. We looked at all the shops and saw a couple of shows.
I think this is the only picture we got together. I know, we’re terrible about that…here we are waiting for the fireworks!
We also got to see a few minutes of the electrical parade before heading over to our suuuuper late ‘dinner’ reservation at the Be Our Guest restaurant at 10:40pm.
Since people are usually planning their trips to Disney months in advance, 10:40pm was the only time left if we wanted to try it out. Why not? ;) I loved it! It was so fun!
This is supposed to be snow falling outside ;)

Day 3 was Disney’s Hollywood Studios – Neither of us had ever been there, so it was fun to see some new things. It was sooooo hot that day so we spent most of the day watching shows, which were mostly in the shade or inside. We went on Toy Story Mania 3 times and Star Tours once, and that was really fun too :)

We had another late night reservations at the Sci-Fi Drive In Diner, but we forgot to get pictures. It’s styled like a drive in movie theater, so it was really dark anyway. But it was really fun, and then we finally made it back to the hotel to get some sleep before we headed home the next day.

We got to the airport to find out that our flight had been cancelled. Along with about 1,000 other flights (not an exaggeration). There had been a technology outage at Southwest and the scramble to get allllll those passengers on allll those flights rebooked was insane. We found a flight that took us to DC via St. Louis 3 hours later than our original flight, but our flight to St. Louis was delayed over an hour because we had no captain! So then we missed our connection to DC. Thankfully while in St. Louis, we managed to get onto a flight that went directly to Baltimore, but that flight was delayed probably another hour and a half. So instead of getting home at 2pm on Thursday, we got home at 1am on Friday. Whew! It was such a bummer to be delayed for so long, but we also felt really sorry for all the Southwest employees who had to deal with all the grumpy passengers and try to get everyone to their destinations.  But we made it home and back to the boys, so that’s all that matters. It was such a fun trip, thank you to our parents who made this possible! You guys are the greatest!

Hot Air Balloon Baby Shower

So a week after I threw Spencer’s birthday party, I was throwing a baby shower (July has been a crazy month for me, if you couldn’t tell ;) ) for a cute girl that I visit teach. She chose the theme of hot air balloons (she’s having a baby girl) and it was such a fun theme to work with! And I had lots of wonderful ladies help me out by providing the location for the shower and bringing food and preparing games, which was so wonderful!
I didn’t get as many pictures as I would have liked of the actual shower, but I got some shots of the set up before people arrived and started eating all the goodness ;)

We played some very fun games that my friend Charity put together (THANKS Charity!).  We started with a name the animal baby game, and then we played a game where you had to pull out safety pins from a bowl of rice while blindfolded (a lot harder than it sounds) and then finished up with a very fun matching game where you got candy when you made a match. We ate yummy food and visited and the mom-to-be opened gifts. Thanks to everyone who helped make this shower happen, I really appreciate it! And I hope my friend’s baby girl comes soon! We are excited to meet her!

A Traintastic Day in Chuggington

Remember our “Day Out with Thomas”? Well, the B&O Railroad museum put on another similar event with the Disney show Chuggington and my mom took us to check it out earlier this month. The boys loved it! Especially Nathan, who has seen alllll of the Chuggington episodes.
We started in the gallery – which we had missed the last time we were there. It was really cool, they had these amazing train models.

Then out in the roundhouse and around the outside area they had these little challenges/games  for the kids to play and earn colored bracelets that matched the main characters. Here we were putting out fires with Wilson:Building with Brewster
And then we did this fun little relay for the game with Koko but I don’t think we got any pictures. Oh well…
We also got to go on a real train ride for this event, something that Nathan was really excited about!
Oh, that face! Love him!
Keeping busy by eating Mommy’s necklace…


After we got off the train ride, we were led over to a little show where we got to meet the characters. The main storyline was that we were throwing a party for one of the characters, so all the kids got party hats and horns. Nathan LOVED his party horn. Spencer slobbered his into soggy pieces…
Our attempts at a selfie ;) I’m still in shock they both actually wore the hats for longer than a couple of seconds!!!

There they are!

You’ll notice that my children are awesome at looking at the camera for posed photos… ;)

After the show, we stopped and got a snack. Both boys tried the blue raspberry snowcone that Nana had bought and loved it. Spencer especially ;)
Why did you stop feeding me the yummy blue cold stuff?
After walking around a little bit more, we stopped at the gift store for a souvenir and headed home! 

Thanks for a fun day Nana!