Jackson's End of the Year Party

Jackson had his End of the Year Party at school today (even though their last day isn't until June 7th). I can't believe he's about to finish kindergarten! Aubrie and I got to attend:

We ate hot dogs, fruit, & chips.

Aubrie enjoyed seeing Jackson's classroom (yes, she picked out her outfit for the day): 

We had ice cream sundaes: 

We got to bring home a meal-worm, wahoo! We get to wait until it hatches from its larva and then turns into a beetle. Then we release it ;)

We did lots of playing:

Jackson and his teacher, Mrs. McPhail:

Fort Lauderdale: DAY 9

We woke up this morning to pouring down rain. so with our plans for swimming out we decided to go ahead and pack up and head home. We left around lunchtime and headed for Lake City. It was a long but uneventful drive and the kids were really good.

After a quick dinner we headed to the hot tub for a little bit. 

We are all exhausted and ready to be home. (Drew is still in Fort Lauderdale but should be home with us sometime on Friday!) Good Night!

Fort Lauderdale: DAY 8

This morning the kids and I visited Gumbo Limbo, a Sea Turtle rescue and rehabilitation facility in Boca Raton. It was a beautiful and well-maintained place that had a very helpful and informative staff, the kids and I loved it! As always, be warned there are LOTS of pictures! :)

They had some really neat tanks set up for viewing. 

This tank was desinged to resemble a sunken ship reef. There were small sharks, stingrays, huge lobsters, and all sorts of marine life in them.

We also got to see baby sea turtles as well as a few of the turtles that were in the hospital temporarily until they are well enough to be released back into the wild.

The baby in the video was 7 months old, at his full grown weight he'll weigh 300 lbs!

This was at the seahorse display.

The below picture is for the few members of our family that I knew would get a kick out of this. The display was hanging in the bathroom (!!) and titled: The Scoop on Poop. I'll let you guess what the display is of...

They also had a beautiful boardwalk with a nature trail, butterfly garden, and observation deck.

There were hundreds of fiddler crabs scurrying around in the roots of the mangrove trees. 

Jackson was exhausted after all of the walking!

Afterwards we met Drew back at the hotel and decided to attempt the beach again. It was SOOO much better than when we went over the weekend. While it was a bit overcast and windy, it was actually nice because it wasn't as hot. The kids had a blast because there was a playground right on the beach. I may be a  bit partial, but I think our beach on the Gulf Coast is soo much nicer...nicer sand, no oil tankers in the background, cleaner, less seaweed...pretty much everything ;)

Look what we found! A sea turtle nest that had been roped off for protection. The kids thought it was really neat since we just learned all about them this morning and the rehabilitation facility. 

We even found a coconut. Although we opted not to bring it home because it smelled like sour milk!

Now we're all back at the hotel (except for Drew whose at work) and are getting ready for a good night sleep. Our "journey" will be ending soon as we plan on leaving Thursday morning. Good Night!

Fort Lauderdale: Day 7

We began this morning with none other than breakfast in the hotel, I even took a picture today :)

Per Aubire's request she had cereal and milk, pancakes with syrup, scrambled eggs, a donut, fruit punch, and milk. So even though she only ate about one bite of everything she still had a good breakfast...

After that we headed over to a place called the Funderdome. It was a huge indoor playground that kids had a BLAST in. We stayed for just over 4 hours! I took a ton of pictures and videos. 

Aubrie would only slide down the orange slide. For some reason she was convinced that it was the slow slide and all of the other colors were too fast and scary. 

They had a Ball Blast Arena where you could shoot Styrofoam balls at each other. 

This is how Aubrie went down the stairs:

Jackson was really brave and climbed the rock wall! I was so proud of him for trying even though he was nervous!

Jackson getting all belted up!

We took a break for lunch before playing some more!

There was a really cool Lazer Maze. You had to crawl through the lasers without touching them and hit the blinking buttons on the wall to "complete the mission" (It was really hard to get a good picture since it was so dark inside)

Below our videos of the interactive activity floor. 

Jackson spent 20 minutes putting together this really cool tower/tunnel. (Of course, not 2 minutes after I took this, some wild kid came barreling through and knocked it all down).

The kids playing in the Sports Court in the sky.

There was also a really neat zipline course that was above everything but Jackson was little too scared to try it. Maybe next time if we're ever down here again!

After we got back form the Funderdome we went out to Outback for my birthday dinner :) Then we came back and finished off my cake!

Now Drew is at work and the kids and I are winding down in the hotel room and trying to decide what to do tomorrow. Good Night!

Fort Lauderdale: DAY 6

Not every day can be a good day. Especially when your on "vacation" with two young kids, and today was just one of those days. It started off well with breakfast at the hotel (did you expect anything different?) and then the kids and I did a little shopping nearby.

When Drew woke around noon we decided to head down to the beach for just a couple hours so the kids could see the Atlantic. I knew it would be busy being Memorial Day Weekend but what we encountered went beyond what I was expecting. The drive that should have taken 15 minutes took over an hour and when we finally made it there was no parking..and I mean NO parking. Even lots that were charging $50 a day (yes, $50!) were full. And in case you were wondering, you are NOT allowed to hop out of a car while on the strip and stand in a parking place to hold it until your husband can find the entrance into the parking lot to park. The cop informed me of that. So here was the beach we saw (from the car):

And here are the kids enjoying the beachview (from the car):

So of course the kids were dissapointed we didn't get to go to the beach. Drew and I had to come up with something else fun to do with them to cheer them back up. There's a new chick-fil-a with a cool playground that just opened a few miles from the hotel (but in the opposite direction of course!). We decided to go anyways.

And since a bad day has to contain multiple issues, we hit a draw bridge trying get off the beach which backed up the traffic even more. (Although, Jackson thought it was really cool to watch the bridge go up and down.)

After close to 2 hours from leaving our hotel we fiiiiinally arrived at Chik-Fil-A.............................. And you guessed it, it's Sunday. Yep, They're closed. Closed! Not being on a normal schedule we are all out of whack and completely forgot what day of the week it was, so we have disappointed kids yet again. 

We decided to just grab something nearby to eat and take the kids back to swim at the hotel. We chose this place called Pollo Tropical. It looked good with healthy tropical/spanish style food. Eh...not the best choice. While the food was edible (barely) its not somewhere I would ever visit again. 

Finally we arrive back at the hotel to swim and the day slowly begins to redeem itself. 

Aubrie discovered floating on her back today and this is how she spent the majority of her time in the pool.

We came back up to the room, the kids got baths, and we decided to eat the birthday cake Drew got me a day early since we hadn't had the best afternoon. 

But of course no bad day can end on a good note. Drew had not been gone 15 minutes when I hear this conversation from kids. (I'm in the bedroom and they're in the living room).

Jackson: Uh Oh....Don't tell Mom

Aubrie: Why Not?

Jackson: Because we'll get in trouble.

Aubrie: But I have pee!

I debate for a minute if I really want to walk out there and see what they've done, but I finally conclude I don't have a choice. Somehow they had managed to lock the bathroom door and shut it with no one inside so we can't open the door. Now this happens occasionally at home but we have really simple locks that I can twist open with a butter knife or credit card but these locks are more complicated than that. 

I call Drew and of course there's nothing he can do, so I call the Front Desk and they assure me they will send someone up within 10 minutes. So the hotel guy finally knocks on our door and I let him. He looks at the lock and says:

"Uh oh, these aren't the kind of locks I'm used too. I just switched from another hotel and we had the  locks you could just slip a butter knife into and unlock"

(Did he really think I would call him up here if it was something I could unlock myself?) So he leaves to go and find something to unlock it with. Five minutes later he comes back with.....a paper clip! I just roll my eyes behind his back as he struggles to unlock the door with a paperclip for 5 minutes before concluding that isn't going to cut it. (Somebody's been watching too many spy movies).

Sooo he finally comes back for the third time about 10 minutes later carrying a large tool box. He goes through about 4 different screwdrivers before he finally finds one that unlocks the door. Geez!

Now I hope you all have had a good laugh at everything we went through today because while I was NOT laughing at the time, as I go back and read this I definitely am. We're off to bed now and hoping that tomorrow is a better day! ;)