Christmas

Well, the Christmas Holiday is over and everyone has gone home. The house is empty but I have my memories. Who came down for Christmas - My son Wayne, his wife Wendy and their kids, Samson and Addy were the first to arrive. Then came my daughter Amy and her husband Dan and their kids Kylie and Bowen. Last was my daughter Anna and her mate Heidi and 6 month old Skylar who everyone wanted to hold. If you count them up that's a total of 12 people counting me - Polly went home to CT to be with her family - smart move - the house was full.









Walt Disney World provided most of the entertainment - It was decked out for Christmas.

Wayne held the record for endurance - he left for the Magic Kingdom at 7 AM and didn't get back until midnight. Kylie, who went with him, had to get up and go to Animal Kingdom at 7 the next morning. I started out with him but chickened out and went home with Dan and Amy at 7 PM. This was my sign out picture in front of Cinderella's Castle










Great rides - check out the first car on this roller coaster.

Here's a close up. It was Kylie, Amy (eyes covered), Bowen and Anna - very brave people.

This is the new addition to the family Skylar (and Anna and me)













She attracted all the attention - that's Kylie, Bowen and a piece of Addy.









Besides Disney we went to Myakka State park which gave an airboat ride to get a good close up view of a lot of alligators.

They also had a canopy walk that gets you into the tree tops (that's Samson).





The best prank, the shark tooth find. The Fenstemakers (Gary and Sandra) were amateur archaeologists at one time and collected a lot of fossils - I told the kids how we were walking along the drainage canal next to our house one day and Gary found a shark's tooth. So everybody spent a lot of time walking the canal banks and looking for shark teeth to no avail. When Sandra and Gary came over for a visit, I asked them to bring some shark teeth with them. When they arrived, I secretly took the teeth from them and put them in the sand in the backyard. Later I told the kids that Gary and Sandra were going to show them the proper way to look for shark teeth. We all went out to the backyard and Sandra bent down, studied the sand some and picked up a black shark tooth - the kids went wild - everybody was down in the sand and found some of the shark teeth that I had salted the sand with - then they spread out - down on all four - crawling all over the place looking for more teeth. I finally fessed up and told them that the teeth were planted.

It still didn't stop us from looking. Here we are checking along the banks of a dried up lake - found some manatee ribs but no shark teeth.













Citrus is what Florida is famous for so we went out and picked some. The only ones that nobody liked were the Kumquats.









Everyone was impressed with the hundreds of Manatees at the local power plant, they loved the puppy hugging at the Guide Dog Society, they liked the prices at the Red Barn Flea Market, and the horses at the Lipizzan Stallion Show did some fancy stuff. I hope everyone comes back again and, if you weren't in this group, we are here from October to April, stop down and see us.