THE NEWTON'S

We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!  We enjoyed a quiet day with just our family.  We had our Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve, and the kids asked if they could go ahead and go to bed!  It was only 6:20 and we told them it was too early (they would've been up at 2am if they went to sleep that early).   So we forced them to sit and watch a christmas movie and we had family prayer and got pj's on and then they had their second wind and were too excited to go to sleep! lol!  We finally got them all asleep by 9:30.  Rich and I then had our Christmas tradition of wrapping all the presents and worked on that for a few hours, then had to relax and wind down ourselves and got to bed around 1am. lol! We started hearing voices from the kids around 5:30am, but had told them they couldn't come wake us up until 7am, so we listened to them search through their stockings, and look at the wrapped presents, and had a chuckle when Angela came and announced tha...

We had planned on driving to Disney World, until Rich found an amazing deal on airline tickets from Dallas for 150 round trip.  So about a month and a half before our trip we changed our plans.  This allowed Rich to sign up for the Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning, and Ashley decided decided she wanted to do the fun run- so she and I did the fun run that morning.  It was FREEZING!  But we had a good time and a it was a good start to our vacation.   After the turkey trot we came back home and rested, finished packing, and we had an early dinner of leftover Thanksgiving dinner (I made our big dinner the day before).  Then cleaned the kitchen up, loaded into the car and drove down to Dallas.  At the hotel in Dallas we had a snack of leftover rolls and turkey and cheese... the kids remembered how much they loved sandwiches on rolls, and then we tucked everyone into bed to try and get some sleep since our flight was for 8:30 in the morning. The ne...

We got up and packed our stuff back up into suitcases and went down to the Lobby and left them and our backpack's with the guest services desk.  They would transfer them to where we were going to be staying for the rest of our trip.  Then we hopped on the bus to the Animal Kingdom.  This year was a turning year for our family and theme parks.  Angela is now tall enough to ride a lot of the rides that she couldn't ride in the past.  My favorite thing was to come off of a ride and hear her little voice saying "That wasn't even scary!  Let's ride again!"  We hadn't had breakfast at the hotel so we got everyone some breakfast at a little bakery near the Kilimanjaro safari.  Then we grabbed fast passes for Expedition Everest to use later in the day and then we warmed everyone up with the rides in Dino-land first... the Triceritop Spin  for Angie and I and Primevil Whirl for everyone else.  Then we headed to Dinosaur.  Angie was ex...

We slept in and didn't wake up until around 11am!  WOW!  I can't remember the last time we went on vacation and slept in that late.  We took it easy and hung out in our rooms, got up and headed to Downtown Disney.  We picked up some lunch there and window shopped and then went and saw the new Harry Potter Movie.  Afterwards we went back to the hotel and checked out the activities around the grounds of the resort.  We tried our hands at playing Bocce ball, and table tennis.  The kids went swimming in the pool and then we went to dinner at one of my favorite Disney Restaurants... Boma.  I LOVE the food there.  It's just unique and great.  They didn't have my favorite soup out that day, but I found plenty of other stuff that I liked. Then we called it a day and went back to the hotel.  You would have thought that since we slept in so late the day before, we would be up and ready to go early the next day.  But we enjo...