Daddy Date To The Aquarium

Crafting Outside

The First Tooth

This morning Red Fish woke up with a lose tooth.  I was too much of a chicken to pull it for her, so she asked her kindergarten teacher to handle it for her.  When she brought it home (marked with the date and time) we made a little tooth fairy pillow together. Someone told Red Fish that the tooth fairy (and Santa etc) aren't real.  I was extremely ticked.  Red Fish still wants to believe and she was shattered by the news.  We decided together that she can believe anything she wants to so we stitched beads onto the pillow spelling out: "I believe in magic." The pillow has a little pocket for notes and teeth.  My baby is growing up.

The Flight Home

Yep we are THAT family in the airport.

The Everglades

 Whenever we travel we try to go to the local National Parks if at all possible.  Who knows when we would be near the Everglades National Park again? We wanted to do the boat tour so we drove 40 miles into the park.  We saw a manatee while we were on the dock.  I did not get a good picture but it was a cool experience- a first for all of us.  When he pulled his head out of the water, Red Fish was especially shocked by his experience and took a few steps back.  She ended up buying herself a little toy manatee from the store because she liked him so much.

 The boat ride ended up being lame.  We saw one tiny American crocodile (I didn't know we had crocodiles) and the mangroves but it was a fairly uneventful ride.  If you are planning on visiting the Everglades I would skip the boat tour and save your money.

Mangroves

 We collected junior ranger packets from the Flamingo visitor center and started to think that the Everglades just wasn't our favorite park.  We decided to stop at the Anhinga board walk trail and it completely changed our minds.  Every few feet down the trail there would be an alligator, an anhinga, or a giant neon grasshopper. We saw turtles and wildlife at every turn.  This trail alone was worth the trip. We spent several hours looking at all of the animals.

Beach Day

No trip to Florida would be complete without a trip to the beach so we loaded up our stuff and got back into the car. We stopped at the beach on our way from Orlando back to Miami to check out the sand and water.  The girls are good at making friends wherever they go so they immediately had a posse to run with through the waves and and build sand castles.

Epcot

Epcot is lame. My kids were not interested at all.The only thing we really enjoyed was the Fast Track ride.

Magic Kindgdom- Picture Overload

 The Magic Kindgom is the clear favorite. The line to see Anna and Elsa from Frozen was five hours long. Don't worry- I had already warned my girls that they had no shot of standing in a line for Frozen characters.  There was no way I was going to wait for hours to see someone dressed like a princess.  The girls did get to see Tiana, Rapunzel and Cinderella without waiting more than ten minutes so I think they were pretty happy.  The new magic bands with the fast passes you can reserve online are awesome. The lines weren't too overwhelming.  We got to ride on everything that we wanted to.

Rapunzel in front of her tower.

Splash Mountain

New Fish was hilarious on the rides.  I think several of them terrified her but she was very brave and willing to try everything.  She was just half an inch short for some of the rides so we measured her in different pairs of shoes before we left to make sure that she would be tall enough to try everything.  I don't think we will be going back to a Disney park in the near future so I didn't want her to miss out on anything.  In the middle of Star Tours she screamed: "Help!  Is this really happening to me?" She honestly thought she was zooming through space.

The best part of the Magic Kingdom is definitely the parade, show and fireworks at the end of the night.  There is something completely magical about the electric lights parade and the light show they project on Cinderella's Castle is AMAZING.  I had never seen anything quite like it before. It was the most peaceful magical part of our Disney World time. The kids were mesmerized.

Disney World- Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios

Tower Of Terror

We were not big fans of the Animal Kingdom.  I was frustrated because we got off to a slow start and several rides weren't working and we didn't have a good handle on where we were going. When I'm on a trip I like to make the most of every minute so wandering didn't sit well with me. It felt like kind of a waste of the first half of the day. We went to Hollywood Studios in the afternoon and went on more rides.  We went on Tower of Terror with my parents.  It was a pretty bold ride for my Mom.  I don't think she was a fan.  I was afraid New Fish would cry but she just said it was really scary.