Halloween night, one of my family's favorite times of the year. We set out at 6 PM, as usual; we set out just as it gets dark so that we can all trick-or-treat together before Amanda heads back to the house to hand out candy. This year was different, however- there have been very few kids out so far, including our own! Emily and Alex went to about twenty houses, and then they declared they were done - we were home by 6:40! At 7:15 I convinced them to visit some other houses in the cul-de-sac (two), then at 7:30 or so Amanda convinced them to go out for a little longer; they probably hit 5-10 more. It's been a very light year for trick-or-treating, but at least our kids got "their fair share". :)

Happy Halloween!

You just can't get enough

Emily, Alex and I are partaking of one of the last weekends at American Adventures. They've decorated for Halloween. Some of the decorations are pretty scary! You wouldn't expect that at a park aimed at small children. Well, they make up for it by giving candy at each of the rides. That's what we need- more candy to add to the 5-10 pounds we got from our earlier endeavors.

But as you can guess, the kids love it.

Go LEMA!

Our team-building exercise was to build a "world class" organization. We flew through that and went on to make a world class architecture.

And oh, the Dreams we Have...

Zurg in Jail
Originally uploaded by GalapagosFinch.

We were at Magic Kingdom on the first da of the "Year of a Million Dreams". We had so much fun! Our touring plan (www.touringplans.com) worked very well here because Claire can ride all the rides in Fantasyland. Things went very smoothly till lunchtime; after lunch, all we did was Tom Sawyer Island (my first visit there _ever_) and shop. We went home for downtime in the afternoon, then returned to the park around 7 PM. We were only expecting to stay for two hours, but saw a sign saying "extra magic hours", which worked out great! Steve and Amanda got to ride "Pirates of the Carribean" (Shirl rode it earlier in the day) after the evening fireworks with only an eight minute wait. Sure, we didn't get home till after 11:00 AGAIN (even with the ride home the next day), but it was well worth it. All in all, visiting the Magic Kingdom last really topped off our great vacation.