Hollywood Studios

Alright, this park was by far my FAVORITE!! Not only am I a MAJOR movie buff I am a ride maniac and this park had my favorites! We saw some way cool shows here: the Stunt show that had all kinds of car stunts etc, Indiana Jones and the little mermaid were the ones we went to see and they were all awesome! Then we went on a Great movie show ride that went through all the years of great movie making- it was neat! They also had an awesome coaster here called the rock-n-roll roller coaster and it features Aerosmith and their music. It was great! The Toy Story 3D ride is a park favorite and we could see why- it was very cool! But my favorite thing from the whole trip.... The Hollywood Tower of Terror!! I just love that ride! I could go on it over and over! SOOOO fun!! Can't wait to go back! Hope you enjoy all the pics from our trip! :)

Blizzard Beach and the pool

I lived at a water park growing up in Arizona but Blizzard Beach makes the one I went to look LAME! It had everything a great water park should have, but the BIG thing was the 12 story water slide! we actually saw it on the travel channel before we left! It has a ski lift that takes you up to it and then it's all downhill! I was impressed that all our kids DID that! There was NO WAY I was going to! These pics are fun- we are definitely water people! (and sorry I forgot to make some of the pictures upright-oops!)

This is the video of the kids going on the huge water slide! it's sideways again- this one I had to do this way to get the length in! Its pretty cute! I get a couple of strangers in before you actually see them go down.

Epcot

I enjoyed Epcot because it had a wide variety of things. I loved the area with representation from different countries and being able to see the differences in architecture and foods. Carter was excited to go in and see all the German things and speak some German to the ladies working the German candy counter. He is in his 2nd year of German so that was cool! And the ride in the "big ball" was really fun- probably my favorite thing there! Another fun ride was the Nemo ride- we are in the shells in the picture- it was cute! And Brianne loved the interactive show with the turtle from Nemo- it was fun!

Animal Kingdom

I was surprised at how much I loved the Animal Kingdom! They had one of my favorite shows we saw, which was the Lion King Show, and the safari was amazing but the capper had to be Everest! That roller coaster is F-U-N!!! And we enjoyed sitting at the base of that HUGE tree trying to find all the hidden animals. It was way cool!

Magic Kingdom

I wanted to put a glimpse of our wonderful trip to Disney world on my blog, so instead of making the longest post ever I decided to make slide shows of a few of my pictures from each park! I am a picture freak- as most of you know- so there's TONS more, but at least you can see some of our fun! Here is the slide show from the Magic Kingdom!

Christmas 2010

Well our Christmas this year was a blast! Lots of fun surprises for all! But I will start with Christmas Eve: we spent that with Chan's family at his sisters home and had some yummy food and watched a holiday movie. Once it was getting to bed time we had the kids open their usual Eve present of Christmas PJ's! They all loved them! Then for us it was time to head home, so we did a quick drive past the Draper Temple and went home to get the kids to bed. The funniest thing about Christmas eve was a text we got from Carter at about 10:30 saying "I'm still awake"! He couldn't sleep!! I went down to talk with him and he asked for some NyQuil, and at about that same time Will walked in and said "me too"! We are not usually ones to do that sort of thing, but if we wanted ANY sleep we HAD to! So after a couple cups of NyQuil they were finally sleeping! The picture shows Carter's cute idea of putting their trees up in the living room so that Santa would leave their stuff by their individual trees!! LOVED THAT!

Santa finally arrived after all in the house were asleep! And just as the kids wanted he placed everything by their respective tree!

Finally the big moment arrived- and you can see from Will's reaction here- they were not disappointed!

But then came the fun part for us! Chan and I had been holding a gift secret since this past March when we arranged their "gift" and we had them open a series of gifts with clues to figure out what it is! Here's Carter reading one of the clues...

Each one of them opened a clue- this is Brianne opening the Dolphin clue...

They all helped open the final clue- we had them guess what they thought it might be before opening it. They all knew it was some sort of trip but all guessed wrong. Then Carter saw the "card" and they figured it out!

Their excitement shows well in this photo- we got our kids a cruise!! The exact one that Chan and I did for our anniversary this past year! We even booked them to swim with the Dolphins just like we did!! It was sooooo fun to surprise them!!

Then it was time for surprise #2- funny that the photo goes along with it! So once we opened all our gifts to our kids and the ones from my extended family we went off to have Christmas with Chan's family. His parents did a similar thing with the kids- which we were totally in on- and they each opened a gift with a clue, like the one Carter is holding.

Here's a shot of Chan's Dad trying to help the kids figure out what it all means!

The sentence so far, but what does the ????? paper mean?

Each of them had a final gift to open and it was a shirt rolled up inside out, so if they look confused it's because they were!

So Papa turned on a video to help them put the puzzle together! They thought it was Disneyland, but in fact it was Disney world!!!!

I LOVE this picture! You can tell just how stoked they were!! And like the sentence said we were to board a plane and leave at 10am the NEXT DAY!! We were off to Disney world for 10 days!! WOO HOO!!! Now, I have to say that had we known his parents were giving this gift we wouldn't have booked the cruise, but we had already done that when his parents decided to do this trip! So we left the 26th and returned on the 5th of January! I am going to do several posts later to show our "magical" time there! And I'll try to get them done before we leave on Friday for our cruise!! Can't wait!! Thanks Tom and Kathy for a fantastic memory making vacation!! It was the best gift EVER!