Animal Kingdom

Tuesday was our Animal Kingdom Day… and everyone was excited.  We were the only ones who had been here before and within an hour or two some were saying they could spend a second day here.  It is a fun jungley atmosphere… totally different from Magic Kingdom. 

As soon as we entered the park we made our way back to Mt. Everest – the big roller coaster ride.  A few of us stayed back with the babies and strollers and the large group proceeded towards the gate to use the fast passes.  Megan was so excited… but when she got to the gate she was just barely not tall enough.  Crestfallen she walked back to sit with me.  Life is so unfair.  A couple minutes after the crowd cleared she walked back over to measure herself again…. just in case.

When they got out it was my turn to ride and most people opted to ride again.  Only this time while our roller coasters were zooming through the mountain someone just finishing the ride was having a medical emergency which required the entire ride to be shut down.  After ten minutes sitting in our stopped roller coaster at the highest point in the mountain we were ‘rescued’.  Disney workers climbed 17 floors to come escort us back down and what started out being a roller coaster ride ended up being a cool behind the scenes tour.  We walked in single file through a door  into a cavernous building full of tracks and support beams…then into the stair wells to climb down 17 flights of stairs.  At floor 9 we ran into the rest of our riders… Chris, Emily, Mike and Grandpa who were stranded in a different location.  It was a happy reunion and we couldn’t stop laughing about our new adventure.  And for our troubles… a cold water bottle and tickets to ride the mountain later.

   

 More Magical Memories of Animal Kingdom

• Letting the kids play in the dinosaur play land full of stairs, nets, slides and lots of dinosaur bones
• Taking a picture with Pluto
• Katie and Ryan getting soaked down to their underwear on River Rapids!
• Watching Grandpa love the ‘museum’ on the way into the Mt. Everest ride
• Megan re-measuring herself for the Mt. Everest ride
• Seeing alligators, elephants, giraffes, rhinos and tons of cool animals on the bumpy jeep African Safari
• Watching the 3D Bug’s Life show in the trunk of the big Tree of Life
• Being with Luke as he spotted the characters during the parade
• 3 girls screaming in the River Rapids… Leah, Annie and Megan
• Megan stating that her favorite ride was the ‘bunny ride’… which we finally figured out was the River Rapids ride… she thought everyone was saying River Rabbits ride and she preferred ‘bunny’ ride.  So funny.
• Being at the exit at the perfect time for a Donald, Minnie, Goofy dance party where our kiddos danced in a little parade.  So cute!

 

 

 

Magic Kingdom

We had decided early this year that we wanted to take advantage of the amazing military deals for Disneyworld.  We picked a week where the kids would only miss four days of school… (a big deal here in Georgia),  researched cheap flights for my parents and got on the phone prepared with a list of reasons why they should come with us.   But we didn’t need the list.   They said, ‘we’re in’ after the first sentence.  Dan and Sarah had already been wanting to make the trip and no one else could resist the perfect ‘Walton Disney Vacation of a Lifetime’.

We caravanned down to Orlando with Dan and Sarah and girls.  Grandpa and Grandma flew from Seattle.  Mike, Amy, Scott and Elisha and kids flew from Utah and Brian sent us his ‘magical best wishes’ from his mission in Arizona.  We met up Sunday night and got settled in the two 2-bedroom condos right outside Disneyworld (through Armed Forces Vacation Club.) and got excited for the week.

Monday morning we got our 5 days Disney tickets and headed to the happiest place on earth… The Magic Kingdom.

First of all, traveling anywhere with the Walton family is kind of hilarious.  6 cameras and 2 video cameras documented everything we did…  and although I don’t have official written releases for all of my siblings photos, I’m pretending I do.  Really everyone should travel with an entourage of wanna-be photographers, a photojournalist brother, a videographer planning each magical scene in his head and a video-clip happy Dad.  It’s so fun.

Our most magical memories of the day…

• Wearing the matching Mickey t-shirts Grandma and Grandpa bought for the kids
• Being so excited on the monorail we can hardly stand it
• Laughing to the funny ‘one-liners’ on our first ride of the day… Jungle Cruise… Ryan being the ‘skipper’
• Watching Luke on the Pooh Bear ride… reminded us so much of taking Ryan on that ride at the same age
• Seeing a few characters… Lilo and Stitch…  Jasmine
• All the cousins on the carousel
• Watching Grandpa and Grandma hold hands throughout the park
• Watching Megan be SOOO excited to do the big roller coasters… finally BIG ENOUGH!
• Hearing Luke say ‘dere mee mou’ every time he saw a picture of Mickey.
• Watching Luke be excited to see Buzz and go on the Buzz Lightyear ride
• Taking pictures by the castle
• Going on Splash Mountain… Chris, Megan and Dan got SOAKED in the back… all captured by Mike
• Watching the ‘Celebrate’ parade at 3:00   Molly was so cute!
• Riding Thunder Mountain Railroad
• Watching incredible fireworks while in line for Dumbo
• Witnessing Sarah’s unfortunate glow in the dark bracelet explosion flinging glow in the dark liquid into her hair and eyes… not very magical but memorable none the less…  complete with Dan capturing funny pictures of her trying to wash the toxic stuff out of her eyes.  ouch!
• Listening to Grandpa do a traditional seal hunt with the grandkids, in the dark, in the middle of Fantasy Land while we waited for Sarah to wash toxic stuff out of her eyes.
• Running onto rides like Peter Pan, Snow White and It’s a Small World with no lines, at the very end of the night, all together
• Favorite rides of the day… unanimously ‘Thunder Railroad, Splash Mountain, and watching Luke on Pooh Bear’

 

 

  

 

And my favorite bunch of photos… captured by Mike on Splash mountain…

Look what Matthew found

   

Matthew is five months old today.    

He’s 16.2 pounds – 38th percentile.     He’s 27 inches long – 81st percentile.

He’s outgrown most of his 3-6 clothes mostly because of his length.

He’s super excited about his fingers and toes these days.  He lifts his legs up and then grabs his toes with his hands, pulling them closer… especially when he’s getting dressed.

He constantly has a finger in his mouth… just one, and he hooks it right around his gums like that’ll help it stay in or something.  We laugh and laugh.   He’s starting to get pretty drooley because of his new finger-sucking habit too.

He likes to sit in his exersaucer and play with the noisy roller toys.  He likes hanging out in the jolly jumper.

Like all of our kids he is a little behind in learning to roll but with trying to protect him from Luke he doesn’t get that much floor time.  We were shocked when he rolled over from back to front a couple days ago.  Since then he has mastered it.  He doesn’t love being on his stomach once he rolls over.

He just grabbed Chris’ plate at dinner last night and we all went ‘uh-oh.’

He smiles all the time.      He laughs at Ryan all the time.

He really is a mellow baby – except when he sees me and then he wants me to pick him up.

He loves hanging out in Daddy’s arms.

He is starting to bite me when he’s nursing except he has no teeth!   He nurses frequently but he’s really quick.

He sleeps through the night about half the time, the other half he wakes up once.  He still sleeps in our closet and we are getting frantic about where to put him.  Now that he can roll over the little tiny crib has got to go. Help!

He loves to grab at toys and loves to hold anyone’s hands.  We say he’s holding us hostage.

Conference Weekend

When the kids came home from school on Friday they walked into the family room to find this… the Conference Wall.  I found something on-line this week that sparked this idea and decided it would be fun to try.  The kids were thrilled.  They didn’t even know what it would be used for (I didn’t really either… in typical Lisa ‘making it up as I go’ fashion…) but they were excited nonetheless. Then they saw the Conference Basket.

• Conference packets printed out from Sugardoodle.net on brand new clip boards
• Prophet finger puppets for Megan
• New Boxes of Crayons – (25 cents from the Back to School sale)
• Apostle Bingo Boards
• Special treats for each session
• Cute homemade notebooks left over from my Young Women ‘pre-Conference party’
• General Authority flashcards
• Secret ‘Do not open until…’ envelopes with special activities to do before each session

They were allowed to look into the basket but couldn’t touch anything.  Oh… the torture!  “Mom, Thanks so much for celebrating Conference!” Emily said.

 

Our first ‘Do not open until…’ envelope contained small pictures of the first presidency, twelve apostles and the Primary, YW and Relief Society presidencies.  Found on Sugardoodle.net. There was no Elder Neil L. Anderson picture so we had to write him in.  Then we added two President Monson pictures and a ‘quorum of 70 speaker’ to complete the whole page.  While we glued we reviewed the apostles names.  I was amazed at how many they knew.  “That’s President Eyring”, Megan yelled.  (Our primary has been reviewing.) “Uchdorf is such a funny name” she giggled as she glued.  After we finished our BINGO boards we taped them to wall. After every talk we circled the appropriate speaker.  No BINGO’s yet!

When the first session started, (at noon for us) the kids were busy busy with their packets… writing down who was conducting, coloring the choir robes, noticing Apostles ties, writing the color of the flowers, copying down the name of the song.  It was priceless to watch.   We looked on the globe to find the new temples, circled the speaker on our Apostle Bingo boards and paused after each talk to tape their picture to our Conference Wall and write down some key words about what they spoke on.

The first session took us 2 hours and 43 minutes.  No, not because we paused to go play outside.  Ryan and Katie were taking such detailed notes that they wanted to ‘rewind’ so they could accurately copy the sentence.  They filled up pages and pages of their notebooks with great notes.  They did so well!  Katie’s favorite talk was President Uchdorf’s.  She said, “Mom, he’s just saying so many good things that I can’t write them all down.”  She threw her pen down on the floor and looked frustrated.  Just then President Uchdorf said, “Don’t be discouraged!”  We all looked at her and repeated his statement to make her giggle.   Saturday ‘morning’ session was fabulous. We loved it.

Our ‘don’t open until Saturday afternoon session’ envelope was a story from the May 2008 Friend about a Conference Reverence Tent.  We read it together and then built a tent in the living room so they could pretend to be like the people listening to King Benjamin.  Ryan was the only one that spent the entire second session in the tent although Luke visited him there quite often.  We ate smarties. We sustained the Prophet.  We wrote and wrote…   

Sunday morning the kids transformed the ‘tent’ (dining room table pulled into the family room) back into a table and sat there for most of the session… the perfect place to spread out all their papers and crayons and take notes.  Despite a small ‘meltdown’ from Emily because she colored the apostles tie the wrong color, it was a great session… especially since Luke and Matthew were taking a nap.  We were once again 25 minutes behind ‘real time’ because of the kids detailed note-taking and they busted me for trying to fast forward through one of the songs.  ‘Mom, those are really good songs.’  I know, I know.  Sorry.  Emily was the one to finally get the first BINGO on her apostle chart.

Things we're looking forward to in October...

• enjoying the beautiful 'cooler' weather
• taking more Family walks around the block
• seeing Grandma and Grandpa and all of the Waltons
• making carmel apples
• trick or treating
• watching Ryan's soccer games
• decorating Halloween sugar cookies
• vacationing with Mickey Mouse
• eating pumpkin squares with creamcheese frosting
• watching General Conference
• enjoying a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner
• going to the Fire Station with Megan's Pre-K class
• eating at the Ward Apple Fest activity
• cheering for more BYU games
• visiting the kids school Halloween parties
• playing in the backyard
• encouraging Matthew to roll over
• shopping for Christmas presents!!
• getting exciting for Thanksgiving with the Christoffersons