A Scrap of Life

As I was scrapbooking photos I came back to my blog to read our trip report for this particular moment. That's when I realized that I'd missed writing about it. So here's a little addition to our trip report... We were walking towards Splash Mountain to use our fastpasses and on the way we saw Goofy walking our way. As soon as Carissa saw Goofy coming she took off running as fast as she could, opening her arms to run right to him for a hug. Goofy opened his arms and took off running too... right past Carissa and straight to Tristan who was 10 feet behind her! In the end, he made it up to her with a kiss.

Really, I do. I love shopping for the best deal on what we want, finding great buys on items and saving our family money. Lately my friend Melinda shared with me a coupon website that I've sort of watched a bit. Well today was my first really, really good deal from there. Take a look at what I got: 15 packages of shredded cheese, 2 bags of french fries, 3 bags of goldfish, some oranges and my favorite, yummy swedish fish. Guess what I paid for all of this... $6!!! Seriously! I am now totally sold. So for all my Northewest friends, I'm going to share the link and hope you can find some deals as good as this. :) www.frugallivingnw.com

After Christmas we took a quick weekend trip to visit my brother Jimmy and his family in Washington. We came up with an entire vanload of presents and baby stuff, both from the baby shower that never happened (darned piggy flu) and from Christmas. Also packed was a very special box from my sisters 13yo son, Jonny... his entire collection of Thomas trains. These were a HUGE hit. Randal was so adorable and loved playing with them, dragging trains around and pulling them in and out of the buildings. Chase and Jimmy had fun building tracks and seeing who could make a full track with no dead ends using all the pieces they had - and there were A LOT of pieces! Isn't Randal adorable!!! The other reason for our visit was to meet baby Alden, who had arrived quite early just 10 days before. He was so adorable and tiny... just cute as can be! I'm so excited to have another nephew, as I think Randal is just adorable and so much fun! (On a side note, I finally get to see my other ...

We woke up early this morning and the first thing I thought was “oh man, we have to go home today!” I really didn’t want to go home. We’re having such a wonderful time! This has really been a time to reconnect as a family, time to appreciate the little things in one another that make us special and that make our family work. And going home means going back to school, work, extra-curricular activities, phones, televisions and video games. It also means going home to our pets, all 8 of them (each with a Disney-character name), whom we do miss and do want to see. So there’s the one upside. We trudge out of bed this morning and hurriedly dressed. We packed all of the last bits of dirty laundry, found a bag to store all the hoodies and waited for bell services to arrive. They knocked right on time and quickly escorted all of our bags out of the room, to be safely stored for our pick-up later in the day. This morning is early Extra Magic Hours at Magic Kingdom and we’re going to take advanta...

Our final full day at Disneyworld is already here. In many ways this trip seems like it has been very long, while in other ways it seems that it has passed very slowly. The good news is that it seems like we’ve been here a while and have so many memories of a wonderful vacation. The bad news is that we soon have to return home. Today is out last full day so we’re making the most of it. We were all looking forward to visiting the Magic Kingdom again because, as Chase says, it’s “classic”. It’s just a great place to experience all the magic that Disney has to offer and for that it’s one of our fave parks at Disneyworld. I came this morning with a plan of attack and, as usual, it went awry. That’s okay though, we had fun and accomplished all that we had planned and then some. We got to the park after rope drop, having just barely missed it because we got out of our room late and the buses weren’t running very quickly either. No worries though, as that didn’t really affect our plan much fo...