Sorry we haven't posted any new pictures since Mary was born 5 months ago. We spent all of last week at Disneyworld, and now that we've recovered from it we thought we'd post the pictures. Evelyn says it was "sooooo magical". We all had fun, but it was probably more magical to be in the stroller than to push it all day.
We went there to celebrate that Nathaniel is finishing his PhD soon (June-ish). For years we had planned to go on a cruise when he finished, but if we went on a cruise we'd have to take Mary, so we decided on Disneyworld instead. We were there for 6 days. There were 4 separate parks, and each one was enormous. I had no idea that the place was so huge. There are 58,000 employees there. Don't ask how many tourists. We were paranoid about losing our girls all week. Our favorite place was Magic Kingdom's Fantasyland. Here's Cinderella's castle. (Mom, remember you can click on these pictures to make them appear larger).
Mary was strapped to my chest the whole week. She was the easy one, she was either asleep in there or she was smiling at everyone. It isn't hard to get a picture of her like this one. Despite getting sore shoulders, I like having her strapped to me because then everyone smiles at me.
We thought we'd go in March to beat the heat and the crowds. It was still a little crowded from the spring break crowd (apparently spring break can be any week of March). It was unseasonably warm, so we tried to go out in the mornings and evenings and avoid the middle of the day.
We got a discount for going during an off season. We stayed at a disneyworld resort and got to eat at restaurants all week. At the end of one day Stacey and I realized the girls had eaten ice cream 4 times. Yikes.
We went to some restaurants that had characters walking around. Grace was excited to see Winnie the Pooh.
Grace and Evelyn with Snow White.
Grace's favorite movie is Mary Poppins so she got really excited to see her. They talked for a few minutes. It was adorable to see Grace get starstruck.
My four princesses with Cinderella.
Something I could relate to. These cars weren't made for legroom though. After getting off of rides like this one the workers would say "make sure nothing fell out of your pockets". Then Evelyn would make sure that she still had the Mickey Mouse-shaped glitter in her shorts pocket that she got at the parade from Tinkerbell. She calls them "sparkles".
This is my favorite picture from our trip to Disneyworld. Most days ended this way.
Another day, another Pooh.
I asked Tigger if he liked to bounce and he started jumping. Evelyn asked why he didn't jump with his tail. False advertising.
Waiting to get into the "Tiki Room".
At the Animal Kingdom. I got sunburned, but we were able to keep the girls from burning.
We owe Nathaniel's mom for giving us this stroller, it was a lifesaver. We put some serious miles on it.
Mary was easy, and Evelyn was pretty well behaved, but Grace was too excited to nap so she got cranky in the afternoons and slap happy in the evenings. We got lucky on this day and she fell asleep in the stroller.
It's a 10 hour drive from from Nashville to Disneyworld. At least it's supposed to be. The trip there was pretty quick cause I drove most of the night. The return trip was excruciating. We tried to drive back on Saturday March 31st. We found out that's the last day for the senior citizen "sunbirds" to leave their apartments in Florida, so on that day there were tens of thousands of them on the interstate. There's only one interstate, and the traffic alternated from 40 to 10 MPH, mostly because of senior citizens driving motor homes. So it took us 2 days to drive back. Stacey took this picture of how I felt about that.
The girls are good travelers though. This trip was relatively easy on them because we stopped every 90 minutes for pit stops. That also contributed to the picture above. Driving all night is far less painful.
