Photo Memories

I'm so thankful for pictures.  I have lots of memories of growing up, but the ones that are sharpest, the ones that are clearest, the ones that I remember best are memorialized forever in photographs.  Next to our bed, I have one of my very favorite pictures - it's the first family picture we ever took after Lily was born.  And it's priceless.  Even the thought of losing it makes me teary!  

My recent posts haven't had many pictures, so I'm making up for that with this little photo journal of our recent vacation.  It all began with Lily's first flight...

(Yes, I was really exhausted when we left.  I didn't realize how much you could see that on my face until I saw this picture!)  We flew to Orlando where we stayed a night in a hotel and then took a shuttle to our cruise ship.  When I read online that the room would be 120 square feet, I wasn't really understanding how small that was...

There was just enough room for Lily to practice her walking and throw the ball with her daddy.

We did sleep in two separate beds just like Dick Van Dyke and his wife did back in the day.  We put the two beds together initially, but there wasn't room for the Pack n Play, so we ended up separating them.  It worked out ok, because we only spent 1 night on the ship anyway.  Due to Hurricane Sandy, we disembarked the ship the next day in order to spend a couple of days in Orlando.  We had to wait quite a while for our shuttle to pick us up...

My Mom took us on the trip along with my brother and his wife and my sister.  Below is a picture of our ship, the Monarch of the Seas.  We joked that it was more like the Monarch of the Port.

We had a whole day in Orlando with nothing planned so we went to Universal Studio's Island of Adventure where the Wizarding World of Harry Potter was opened a couple of years ago.  And it was AWESOME!

Above is my sister-in-law and below is my sister.  We had Pasties and Butter Beer in the Three Broomsticks, we rode the rides, we drank Pumpkin Juice and got Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans.  We even bought two wands!

It was SO cool and SO much fun!  I totally recommend it!  :)

The Island of Adventure also had lots of other attractions.  If you ever visit there, you MUST go on the Spider Man ride - it's VERY cool.  The Dr. Seuss area was also really fun, and a great area for smaller kids.  Lily was maybe a little too small for it.  She did ride one ride there, but she was NOT fond of the Cat in the Hat, as you can see in the picture below...

There's an area in Seussland themed after Gerald McGrew, the boy who imagined how he would run the zoo if he could.  Lily really enjoyed that area, especially since she's put that crawling business behind her and has joined the world of the walkers!

At the entrance of Universal Studios, there was a tiger that Lily growled at every time we walked by.  So on the way out, we stopped to pet it.  :)

By the end of the trip, Lilers was totally conked out.  She slept for 2 hours on one of our flights back to Nebraska.  Thank Heavens, because this mommy needed the 2 hours of sleep on the plane too!

She woke up for about the last 30 minutes of the flight and because it wasn't a full flight, she got to sit in her own seat.  (What a big girl!)

And those, my friends, are a number of the moments from our trip that were captured forever in photographs.  And I'm SO grateful to have them!