Sunday, March 24, 2013

Florida 3: Just hangin

Going up the glass elevators at the World Center. So fun!
 

 
Love these pictures of cousins!
 

 Ty is a little adventurer! He loved exploring the bushes. :)

Florida 2: Nana's 80th Birthday Party!

On Saturday night we celebrated Nana turning 80! It was a sweet night of fellowship, honoring Nana and hearing some fun stories about her, and dancing the night away. She is such a wonderful woman, I wish we lived closer so we could spend more time with her! She has 6 children, 26 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren (which will be 17 by the end of the year!). What a wonderful legacy!!
Our table for dinner.
 
Our neighboring table. 
 
Cousin kisses. I love how much Ty loves his cousins! He is so sweet with babies and loves to hold, hug and kiss them as much as Libby. Must get it from me. :)
 
 Here is mu handsome boy all duded up for the party: Love him!
 
 Libby was so excited to wear her new dress she helped pick out for the party.
Here's the kiddos in their fancy clothes (as Libby would put it). She loves dressing up!
 With Hudson:
 My pretty girl.
 The kids playing on the dance floor. Libby seems so old to me when I see her interacting with her little second cousins. She loves Adaya! And we love it when they visit!

 Don't think she knows what to think about all this attention from other kids!
 Sweet Libby, Adaya and my cousin Melanie (who flew in with her husband from Guatemala just for this one night!).
 Sweet girl.

 Let the dancing begin. Loved Ty nad Annie dancing together!
 And Libby shakin' it in the background! :)

 Matt and Libby, love this pic!

Unfortunately didn't get any pictures of our family before the dancing started (and Ty lost the vest and tie and I got all sweaty) so we didn't get any great family shots. :( Oh well, this will have to do:

Florida 1

We went to Florida at the beginning of this month for my Nana's 80th birthday. It was so much fun getting to spend some time with Nana, cousins, second cousins, Aunts, and Uncles. Not to mention all of my family. I will treasure that time for many years to come till we can do it again. I love family reunions!! I especially loved the chance for my kids to hang out with their cousins and my cousins (second cousins?), and my cousins' kids (also second cousins?). :)
 
Here are a couple pics of the trip down. We carpooled with Scott and Ash and Nicole and Sam. We left Thursday night and stayed in Valdosta, then finished the last few hours in the morning. That was a great way to break it up!
 
The kids did great! No breakdowns in the car, although we did here "When will we be in Florida for Nana's birthday?" quite a few times.
 
Libby with her coloring table. This girl likes to color and does an amazing job picking appropriate colors and staying in the lines. She takes 30 minutes to an hour just to color 1 picture, but the outcome is worth it. And it keeps her occupied for a while.
 
Here she's coloring some Disney pictures.:
 Ty just chilling. They watched a movie going down and a movie coming back and that was great, but there's only so many kid movies Matt could take while driving so we had to resort to other alternatives. Ty loved seeing all the cows and horses and would scream out "Mooo!" or "Neigh!" when he saw them.


My cousin, Angela's little girl, Abygail, who is Ty's age. She's going to be a big sister this year... to 2 new babies!
 Ty had fun playing around the resort with her the first night.

 
The next day we got to just chill and hang out with all the family at the Marriott World Center Resort.
 
The weather was fair, but rather chilly.
Poppy and Hudson.
 
My cousin, Stephen's little girl Adaya. She is so sweet and full of smiles! She's also going to be a big sister this year. Nana's great grandchildren are multiplying exponentially!
 It was so much fun playing volleyball with everyone while the kids played in the sand.


 Pregnanat Momma. :) Love this girl!

 
 Ty checking out Adaya's blankie-bear.
 
Ty with my cousin, Johnny. Ty loves their family! Probably because they have 3 boys!

Friday, March 15, 2013

Disney 1

We have lots of pictures to post of Disney.  I've also got a few pictures of the main reason we went to Florida, for Nana's 80th birthday! It was so fun and we loved hanging out with and seeing all our cousins, Aunts, & Uncles and celebrating the wonderful 80 years of Nana! 
 
I'll start with these Disney pics and finish later with more (mostly the Princess pictures). They downloaded in an odd order, so these won't be in order.
 
It turned out to be a beautiful day, just not very Florida-like. The cold front that started up here made it's way down south while we were there. Ended up being pretty cold, but warmer on the day we went to Disney. Probably the upper 50's, lower 60's.
 
Classic picture spot in front of Cinderella's Castle.
 
We had such a great time going with Scott, Ash, Annie and Calvin, Peter, Bethany and Hudson, Ben and Bri, and Mom and Dad!
 
Cute little princesses in front of the castle. Had to stop and get a picture!
 
And, of course, our little princess. She was so excited to see the castle. They should have it set up inside with rooms and an area you can explore/tour.

So sweet, I love my girl!


It's a small world from 3 perspectives:
 
Ty, engaged and awed:

Libby, excited and amazed:


The men, oh, the horror!:      :) LOL.
 
According to Libby, her favorite ride at Disney ended up being, "Fun-world, with all the dancing dolls," meaning this ride, Small-world. So glad we were talked into going on it by Bri and Mom!


While waiting, we decided to take the kids to see Ariel, even though they haven't even seen "The Little Mermaid." There were no other rides in the immediate area and I didn't realize Belle was so close (although the line for her, I'm sure, was 3-4 times as long as Ariel's).
 
Here is Libby, patiently waiting for our turn while watching the other little girls with her. It was so cute watching her face!!
 I think Ty was sondering why she didn't have a shirt on as he tried showing her his stomach at one point. Love the look on this boy's face!

Here she is with the 3 kiddos that we had with us. :)

Here we are at the beginning. Taking the monorail in to the park from the parking lot. I actually really enjoyed this part, and would probably ride the monorail all over Orlando if I could. Think the kiddos liked it, too.

Here we are, waiting on tickets to get in. All smiles!


And now we'll jump to the end of the day. The electric parade was awesome! I have pics of that, but didn't have time to load them on this post. Then we moved to in front of the castle for the light show and fireworks. IT WAS AWESOME!!! I was so impressed with the light show, and the way the castle kept changing to look like all the different Disney castles with all the cartoons flying across the castle-screen. I got it on video and will hopefully post it here sometime if I can. Then the fireworks were awesome! Libby loved the part where the "real" Tinkerbell flew on a zipline from the top of the castle down to the ground.
 
Libby, so excited!!
 
Fireworks!
 
Some cool shots of the castle from different angles and in different lighting scenarios. This is so awesome!
 
I don't get many pictures of me with the kids, I need to hand the camera off more often. :)
Here's me and Ty in front of the castle after dinner. After the fireworks, instead of heading out, we went and got dinner. We were all ready for it by then. And then we checked out Tomorrowland, and area we weren't able to get to during the day. We had fun shooting aliens in the Buzz Lightyear ride, but missed Space Mountain. Another day, when the kids are older perhaps.
 
 
When we first arrived at Disney, we immediately hopped on a train to start off our day in Fantasy Land, as it had a lot of rides that the kids didn't want to miss and we were hoping to avoid the crowds at the entry. We missed all the classic pictures, then, so I took a few later on that night.
 
Here is the classic Walt and Mickey statue.
 
 
 Here is the evil Emporer Zurg trapped behind bars. When Libby saw him, she said, "Look, Mommy, they caught him and put him in jail!" And then Uncle Ben suggested joining him behind bars. Libby wasn't too enthusiastic about that. Ty kept trying to immitate Ben by making a gun with his hands to shoot him. It was too cute, the way he was tristing his fingers around to try to make the gun. I think his fingers found something else to do in this picture. Classic boy and love the damsel in distress look on Libby's face. :) 


 Loved this picture, so I had to throw it in here. Right before the parade, we had a fast pass to see the princesses so we bee-lined it there with Scott, Ash, Mom and Dad and the girls while some of the boys rode the Jungle Cruise. Then Libby and I booked it back to meet up with Matt and Ty before the parade started, (we were running down the crowded sidewalks right in front of the parade) and made it just in time. Glad we did, too, because we'd probably have missed seeing not only the parade with them, but also the light show and fireworks. Would have been sad to have missed seeing Ty's face through it and Matt missing Libby's awed responses.
 
Here is the sweet little Princess Cinderella Annie with the "real" Cinderella. I LOVE IT! AND THIS GIRL! She was so cute!!!
More princess pictures to come...