More Disney World and New Orleans

FRIDAY- This was our last day to be in the theme parks. Let me tell you how special Friday was. Only on the weekends in June, Hollywood Studios has something called Star Wars weekends. They have the characters througout the park for pictures, A parade with a lot of the characters, and various shows to watch. They also have three celebrities that were actors in the movies come and sign autographs. We skipped the autographs, because even fastpassing the lines was like a three hour wait and we the boys didn't care much about that. What they DID care about was Jedi training. We ran straight to the line for training when the rope was dropped. Bradley was picked for the first show and Jake wasn't. Jake began boohooing. It was sad, and I was prepared to be there for the remaining five shows at that point for Jake to hopefully get picked. They only chose 30 kids a show. That may sound like a lot, but when you saw all the kids waiting and jumping up and down to participate, it really wasn't.
This is the storm troopers putting on a show on the roof before the park opened.

Here is Bradley getting his Jedi training. It was so funny how serious all the kids were. Then the smoke came and the doors slid open to reveal their opponent. Some little kids cried it was so realistic. And here is young padawan Bradley putting his Jedi training to the test against none other than Darth Vader!!!

Luckily the Jedi who chose the kids to go on stage, picked our little guy Jake for the next show. I was relieved. Jake got to battle Darth Maul.

Jake in training
Darth Mauls entrance. My two padawans :)


The boys looooved getting their pictures with the characters. Especially with Anakin. I let them bring their light sabers with them and this lady we were in front of in line happened to have a sharpy on her and she let the boys use it to have Anakin autograph their light sabers. Bradley said I needed to buy a case for his. Randy said Bradley I don't think that was the real Anakin actor and Bradley said no dad it was, didn't you see the scar on his face. Ha! We let him go ahead and believe in the disney magic :) Some pig guy from Star Wars

Chewbacca and Jake
This was during the parade. Again I don't know how, but we got awesome seats for the parade. Many of the characters walked up to the boys and shook their hands. The boys loved it.

Jake and Boba fet. He's a bounty hunter. Believe me I learned a lot about Star Wars this weekend! Bradley looking at Chewbacca's hands.

Friday night we headed back to Magic Kingdom for one last time.
We had dinner reservations at the Crystal Palace with Eyore, Tigger, Piglet, and Pooh Bear at 9:30. We had already seen the fireworks and spectromagic parade Thursday night, but we got to enjoy another view of it from our table window at dinner. Again Awesome. Jake watching the fireworks..... And Jake falling asleep in his dinner chair after the fireworks. Unfortunately he had to miss the Peter Pan ride after dinner. He did go on it, just Randy had to hold him sleeping while on it.

Now. we left Disney World Saturday morning and were feeling pretty good. Sad to leave, but still had some energy. So, I asked Randy if we could spend the night in New Orleans and go on the Katrina tour Sunday morning. So, here are pictures from our 3 hour tour. They took us all through New Orleans. It really was sad to see that 3 year later, people are still struggling and houses/neighborhoods are in bad shape. I really wanted to go on this tour, because when Katrina hit, we lived in east Texas and our hotels were filled to the max and bus loads of people got sent to our churches and kids started going to our schools. The boys went with me to one of the hotels to meet people and deliver gatorade and toys and diapers. So, I wanted them to see this. Below is Six Flags which got wiped out and never reopened.

The door on the side of this house says "You loot, you die" The Superdome
Remeber the images on the news of the prisoners sitting on the over pass? The guards had to swim them there and keep them there until they could open this place below to be a temporary jail.
On the way into New Orleans we had to take a detour through Slidell because of a chemical spill. Slidell didn't look like it was in very good shape either.
The boys hanging out waiting for our food after the tour.
What a typical street looks like...maybe two or three houses on the block have people actually living in them, the rest are empty and torn up.

This is were Harry Conick Jr. came in and had Habitat for Humanity start building houses for the people. There are 47 houses built so far. 300,000 houses were ruined in the flooding. There is a long ways to go in New Orleans. Our tour guide wasn't real fond of the government, or the govenor of Louisiana. He said she delayed George Bush coming in with aide because she didn't want a republican saving the day.
This used to be a neighborhood full of houses in the ninth ward. It's now full of empty lots. I can't imagine what it looked like before they cleared out all the houses.
Just found this interesting. It was here before the flooding.

And, I leave you with Jake's thought on New Orleans....

WE'RE BACK!

We had an awesome vacation! Our Disney World trip couldn't have gone any more perfect than it did. These post will be long and filled with pictures for family...we'll see how much I get posted today :)

Our first evening there we went to Downtown Disney. The boys loved the lego shop. They wanted to spend all their money the first night, but we convinced them that they would really want their money for the week. By the end of the week, they were thanking us for not letting them spend all their money the first night.





MONDAY- We got up monday morning and headed over to Hollywood Studios. For anyone who has been, they have an awesome Indiana Jones show. Well they asked for four wild and crazy people out of the audience, and everyone who knows me knows how loud I can yell, well that got me a spot on the stage!!! I got to be a stand in. It was so much fun. Randy didn't know how to work the camera real well, so this picture is a little fuzzy.
I'm in the middle of the three people dressed in white robes. The other girl in white is a stand in, and the rest are actors. The other stand ins are off to the side and me and this girl got to stand where all the action in this shot was. It was awesome!
This is the boys below watching the lights, motor, action show. THey loved all the stunts!

Our first night we had reservations at the Coral Reef. Our table was right next to a big aquarioum window. We couldn't have asked for a better spot. And below is our deserts. Man we ate some good food at Disney World.

TUESDAY- We started our second day at Magic Kingdom. On the Jungle cruise ride, Jake got picked to drive the boat and he got a little safari certificate at the end. It was so cute. That's pretty much how our whole week went...awesome. Jake was getting tired by the second day. He plopped himself down in the middle of the walk way while dad was fastpassing tickets. HA!

One of our favorite things to do was ride the ferry back and forth from the parking lot.
Dinner on Tuesday was at the Boma in Disney's Animal Kingdom lodge. It was all you could eat African buffet. It was sooooooo goooood!!!!! WEDNESDAY- We arrived early at Animal Kingdom and visited with some really friendly Disney staff while waiting for the park to open. Well they took us right to the front of the line and we got to follow the safari show all the way into the park to our very first ride for the day. Like I said, cool things like this kept happening to us. We were the first ones to get on the Kilamjari Safari! AWESOME!
The safari ride was incredible. It's not like being in the zoo with walls and cages. The animals are right there! At one point the rhino was walking right next to our car!


Jake, don't get too close to the Dinasour!!!!! I loved watching my kids faces light up all week. They had a blast! This is Jake waiting in line for a flying dinasaur ride.

That evening we went back to hollywood for some character pictures, and dinner at pizza planet. I think our kids were the perfect ages to go. Jake was tall enough to ride all but two rides in all the theme parks, and Bradley was still young enough to believe in a lot of the Disney Magic.
Frozone snuck up behind Jake while he was seeing which Disney Character he was the most like. It was cute to see Jake's reaction when he saw Frozone behind him in the picture.
Here is the picture...Frozone is in the top left of the picture
THURSDAY- I don't have a lot of pictures from Thursday. Jake was extremely worn out by this day, so that morning we went to Magic Kingdom early hours then I took Jake over to Hollywood to ride the new Toy Story Mania while Bradley and Randy continued to ride rides in the parks. Jake and I returned to our hotel by noon to eat lunch, nap and swim. We stayed at the all star sports VALUE resort. Here is a picture. One of the pools was even in the shape of a baseball field and had stadium lights to swim by at night.
After a day of rest for Jake, we met up at Hollywood that evening for dinner and shopping. The boys bought some new light sabers to get ready for the big STAR WARS day on Friday.
Dinner at the Sci-Fi theater. We ate dinner in a car while watching movies...cool.

Jake sleeping with his Jedi Mickey

More to come....I'm going to Walmart to pick up pictures for the boys. We'll see if I post more later tonight?