Orlando

It was so wonderful to have Daniel home on vacation for so long (Oct 11-22). All of us really enjoyed getting to spend extra time with him. He was even able to get away one night with about 5 other guys to "the land" to camp in the cabin. From what I understand, they totally acted like little boys. They had target practice at a pumpkin and pyramids of soda cans (full, of course!), four-wheeled along the trails, and cooked dinner in the dutch oven over the fire. It was good for him to have some "Man" time.

Last Saturday, my mom flew in, got a quick rundown on the kids routines and then that evening Daniel and I flew to Orlando. Vanderbilt provided an opportunity for him to do some research, create a poster, and then present it at a conference in Orlando. We stayed at Loews Royal Pacific Hotel at Universal Studios. It was a really nice hotel with a great pool, so while Daniel was off at the conference on Sunday, I spent some well-deserved "alone" time poolside reading a book (Stephanie Meyer's "The Host"...I like it so far, but I've still got about 1/2 left to read). I even went and ate lunch by myself (something I never imagined myself doing, but after having 3 kids, has become a complete novelty).

We were able to spend time at Sea World, Universal Studios, and Cocoa Beach during the following 3 days. We had such a great time and were completely amazed at how FAST we could cruise through the parks without kids. The day we went to the beach there was a pretty bad rip tide, but we attempted boogie boarding anyway. After literally getting tossed around by the waves, we came back in after only 15 minutes to lay on our towels for the next 2 1/2 hours. It was great! My swimsuit was completely filled with sand, so I was glad that I had thought to bring an extra. I'm still cleaning sand out of my ears.

A few of the evenings were spent eating and socializing with Daniel's fellow residents and also the program's attending physicians. One night, I was somehow the only non-medical person there out of about 12, so I had to help them to not talk only about medicine. The program director (Vanderbilt Anesthesia) even took us to play Putt-Putt. I've never had so much fun! Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures of that since we forgot the camera, but it was pretty entertaining.

It was so wonderful to just get to spend time together, although we found ourselves often mentioning them or saying, "oh, the kids would love this!" We decided we need to make more of an effort to get away together more often. My mom survived amazingly well and was great with the kids. She made them popcorn on Sunday night, and they are still talking about it (I make popcorn for them too, but somehow my mom did it so it was quite memorable). The kids love Grandma, and apparently Addi asked my mom about my dad quite frequently. She loves her grandparents!! Good times were had by all!!!!

Our self portrait at Cocoa Beach. It isn't one of Florida's nicest beaches, but I have memories of going there with my lifeguard team after one of our competitions at Disney World about 10 years ago. I remembered Ron Jon's Surf Shop being pretty cool, so we decided to go back there and sure enough, we spent about 2 hours in that shop!

Daniel in front of "The Hulk" roller-coaster at Universal. This was probably the best roller-coaster we went on the whole trip.

I think Daniel secretly wishes he was Marty McFly.

Here we are: the classic Universal Studios portrait. We decided to try out Universal and Sea World since I have been to Disney many times and we just took the kids a few years ago. We really enjoyed it. I think I can safely say that we favored it more than Disney...but that could have also been attributed to the "no kid" factor.

This is me giving my impression of a Barracuda. You can just barely see the real thing to the right.

The one thing I really enjoyed about Sea World is how close you can get to the animals and how MANY animals they have. For example, this is the Sea Lion exhibit and they must have had about 30 of them in there.

We must have spent over an hour at the dolphin exhibit. I think Daniel was ready to move on after 10 minutes, but I loved it. I couldn't get over how close they were to us! We could have touched one if it would have swam just inches closer to us. They had a separate exhibit with the baby dolphins and I could have spend more time there, but Daniel pushed me along.

Here I am riding Shamu....okay, not really. Unfortunately we weren't able to see the Shamu show because the times didn't work out.