Animal Kingdom

Tuesday morning we were off to Animal Kingdom. I wasn't sure what to expect. I think this was the hottest day and we had pushed our kids all the previous day so we were all really tired. We didn't last the whole day there. We needed a break late afternoon and went back to the pool.

We heard the shows and the Safari ride were the important things to do there. We hopped on the Safari first. It was really fun. It was a huge SUV where they drive you really close to the animals. It was really bumpy as we were going right through where the animals lived.

 this is not zoomed. We could have reached out and touched the Giraffes. They were so close. They crossed right behind our SUV.

 Isn't that tree beautiful? They have a huge tree in the middle of the park called the Tree of Life. It's supposed to be the tree from the Lion King where the monkey lives.

 Ostrich eggs. they were huge!

 The Meerkats were funny.

 And of course... more characters to see. I was impressed with how motivated Siena was too get a picture with the characters. Here she is with her new best friend, cousin Ella.

 When my sister walked in to the park in the morning some lady stopped her and gave her VIP passes to the Lion King show. It was an awesome show. So we got front row seats to it. My kids were even picked to dance with the characters but they wouldn't go up. Sometimes they are such bums.

 It was so good. They had these amazing acrobats as the monkeys.
 We found this big Dinosaur play area and I think that was Ben's favorite part. He would have stayed in there forever.

We ended the afternoon with a Finding Nemo show. It was really good too. I was way impressed with the shows. The characters were really good. I think it's funny to think that people do that as their careers. We walked out of the show afterwards and Claire's diaper exploded  and it was all over me!  She has never had a blowout that big. It was awful. It was a good thing we were going home. I went and cleaned us up. I really didn't want an animal kingdom shirt so I cleaned up as best I could and we called it a day. I think we had basically hit everything we wanted to do there anyway.

Magic Kindgom Parades

Along with meeting the characters and riding some rides we were really excited for the parade and fireworks. The afternoon parade was really fun and we got good seats at the end so we gave high fives to a lot of characters and were close to them.

 some of our favorite characters.

 Here is the electrical parade at night. Here we were all 17 of us together. It was pretty amazing too. All the dancers had glowing costumes. We had good seats but then we had to move and fight the crowd to go where the castle was to see the fireworks. We managed to get right in front of the castle. It's pretty cool how they project things up on the castle and make it change colors. Tinkerbell flies down from the top of the castle at the end. It was very fun to be there. We saw this show nightly from our condo balcony but it was far far away and not nearly as good.

 they project images up on the castle from guests that have visited that day . The pictures were hard to see though I don't think there were any of us up there.

 good camera work Dave.

Disney World Day 1

It's hard to narrow down the 1400 pictures we have of our trip. Yeah we went a little crazy with pictures.

 On our way up through the castle.

 Ben seeing if he was strong enough to pull the sword out.

 maybe they can get it if they work together.

 The first ride. Dumbo. Nana and Papa split up their days with each family. We were lucky to have them the first day for Magic Kingdom. So Siena was with Papa and Ben was with Nana. Dave doesn't do the spinny rides but Claire went on Dumbo and had fun.

 crazy drivers. Ben could hardly see over the car.

 Ben spotted someone coming out of the store with a light saber and told us we had to go in. In this store you got to make your own. He was so excited. He is not into the whole star wars thing but he is into fighting and swords and guns so he had to have one. This salesman was way into it all and helped Ben build it and then fought with him afterwards.

 We decided to take the train around to a different area of the park. The stroller was a must have for our children but it sure wasn't fun to fold it up and down all day and unpack it constantly.

 Claire tagging along.

 Somehow we missed the memo that to get to Disney Word you have to ride a monorail or the boat to even get to it. Ben was so excited we got to be on one of the few Avenger monorails.

 Our first character sighting. We have been working so hard to let the kids know that this is fun and not scary. Siena was in love. She happily went up to all the characters and took pictures. We filled up her signature book and it has to be atleast 30 pages. I was surprised at how personal all the characters get with the kids. The ones that don't have masks over their faces really socialize and ask a lot of questions and take time with each kid. Sometimes that is annoying when the line is long.

 Jasmine was not very personable, but Alladdin was very nice.

 Did you know there was a boy fairy? Terrence. He plays such a little part in the Tinkerbell movie I was surprised that he was there. Ben was not very happy to pose with characters. We think the first day of Disney he wasn't feeling very well.

 Nana got us some good seats for the light parade at night. We learned the hard way, don't move your stroller or someone will come and snatch up your seat. We moved our stroller to make room for my sister and some man came running in to sit with his family. My whole family yelled at him and he was so scared he just sat back and hovered over his poor wife the rest of the parade. We had 17 people that wanted to see and we were there early waiting for the parade.

 Siena not letting go of her signature book. Later that night right after the fireworks Ben and Siena's signature book fell our of our stroller. I was so glad I noticed it. Siena would never have forgiven me if we lost that book.