Back to School ... Back to School

Tyler is at school today.

Even as I type that it does not seem real! I am so proud of him for not giving up and following through with his goal. He is starting his first day of an Executive MBA program at the University of Central Florida (UCF). This is something he's wanted as long as I've known him. The plan was always to get his Bachelor's Degree in Economics and then get an advanced degree. At one point we thought it would be law school, but he's always known that an MBA would be perfect for him and his career plans.

So today he is at orientation at the UCF's downtown Orlando campus and then he begins classes there in a couple weeks. He will be going to school every other weekend (Friday and Saturday) until he graduates in the Spring of 2013. It is a big commitment as he still will be working full time, the Elder's Quorom President in our Ward, and a dad and husband to Jackson and me when there's time!

We are so blessed that his company is paying for this degree 100%. We didn't realize quite how rare this occurs in his company (only 2 or 3 other people ever have done this type of program nationwide) and Tyler had to get approval from the CEO of not only his company but the whole North American Cooperation. They all see so much promise in Tyler, that they are willing to invest in him.

So this morning before he went to class I had to take some first day photos of him!







Jackson has no idea what his daddy is about to do ...


So excited!


But the most important picture is sitting in front of the couch of course!

He followed the example my family set years ago as we always have the same photo on the first day of school. If I was legit I would have one scanned in from me as a first grader, but sadly I don't. So these ones of Steven and Michael will have to give you the idea.

Ya I just realized his backpack was supposed to be sitting next to him and not on his back. dang I'll have to step up for next year.

Just a normal day

I don't have any exciting trip or event to blog about, but today was just a good day. It was a Wednesday which means Tyler was working (actually out of town for the day), but still, Jackson and I had a good time together. I was thinking about my first summer in Florida. Tyler and I were traveling like crazy but I had no job and no baby so I was pretty bored when Tyler wasn't around. My life is so much better with Jackson in it! We don't go on road trips across Florida as much, but I love my little daily routine with my buddy.

Jackson normally wakes up around 7:15, today he was right on schedule. I stayed up too late last night so it took me a while to pull myself out of bed when I heard him on the baby monitor. Another thing - Jackson normally wakes up happy and talking to himself. I don't have to hurry upstairs to get my crying baby. He's normally pretty happy when I walk in his room and sometimes even plays around in his crib for a while before he wants me to take him out.

One thing I'm not too in love with is how as soon as I pick him up out of his crib, he wants me to put him down. He squirms out of my arms so he can run to a toy, a book, and sometimes he runs right to the stairs. I always want him to hug me in the morning, snuggle with mom for a minute after the long night's sleep. But this busy body doesn't want to waste a single second of his day.

We normally go right downstairs and Jackson sits right on the couch and wants me to turn on the tv. At first I thought this was cute, but now I'm really hoping he's not a total tv junkie. But he does watch a couple shows in the morning while we eat breakfast. Normally Yo Gabba Gabba, Sesame Street, or Curious George. Today I think it was Gabba and George.

Most recently he's become obsessed with Life Cereal for breakfast. Some days he'll eat a banana too, but today he just wanted the cereal. He is starting to eat with a spoon, but most bites he digs right in with his hand as he holds the spoon with his other.

Between Breakfast and Lunch is where Jackson basically roams the house and/or plays with toys. Normally roams the house getting into different closets. Today he had fun exploring the guest bathroom cupboards, the closet under the stairs, and of course his favorite place - the bottom 2 shelves of the pantry. Somedays we'll get out of the house in the morning, but it's not an every day thing. Tuesday we'll go to play group, Thursday we go to the library but today was a Wednesday. I wasn't feeling motivated to leave the house with the 93 degree 80% humidity morning weather.

But today Jackson didn't get into much trouble. No falls, no huge tantrums, he plays with his mega block (legos) a lot and is now starting to really like playing with cars and trains. He will read the occasional book, but I feel like he's getting more and more uninterested in them sadly.

(before nap destruction)

Lunch today was grilled turkey/cheese sandwich with strawberries (i had leftover pasta) and Jackson was in bed by noon. He goes down for his naps so easily. I basically just lay him in his crib and he cuddles right up with his blanket (he still takes a binky) and I'm so grateful for that.

(clean-up during the nap)


Today during his nap a huge storm blew through and it rained hard for about an hour. Luckily he sleeps through the weather so it was perfect timing for the rain! Usually it will start raining right when he wakes up which basically ruins any afternoon outing plans. But since it rained early today I decided we should do something special when he woke up! Today he slept for about 3 hours (normally about 2 1/2 - 3 hr) and then we got ready to go on our afternoon adventure.

I decided to go to Disney's Animal Kingdom. We hadn't been in a while (aka a month) and he is so into animals that I thought it'd be fun. We got there at 3:45 and got to see the parade roll by. Normally we (aka Tyler) avoid parades because it's a good time to go on rides with a shorter wait, but we literally walked right into this one and it was perfect. Jackson didn't really know what to think at first but by the end he was clapping and moving to the music and pointing at the characters, and he even waved at Mickey.

Then we headed back to Africa for the Safari and Jungle Walk. We saw gorillas, elephants, lions, hippos, and rhinos. The highlights today were the giraffes running right next to our jeep and the cheetahs laying in the grass closer than I'd ever seen them. Jackson looks around with such intensity the whole time, pointing and saying "ooo" "oooh wow" and "was dat?" to everything he sees. We finished the afternoon off with the Festival of the Lion King Show, Jackson was moving to the music and clapping along and very intrigued with the huge robotic giraffe in our section.

We left the park at 6 and Jackson ate his dinner in the stroller/car on our way out/home. I stopped off at our church building on our way home to grab a couple things from the nursery closet (yes i am the new nursery leader in the ward) and Jackson had fun running around the building for a while. He has fun at Disney, but really likes his freedom to run around when he's out of there.

(pretty tired / out of it when we finally got home)

Then we got home, Jackson watched a Baby Einstein DVD and then we went upstairs for bed. He climbs up in the rocking chair with me as we read a few books together. He folds his arms when I tell him it's time for a prayer, and then immediately wants to go in his crib. He reaches for it wanting to go in. By 8:15 he's asleep and I love peeking at my precious sleeping baby.

I'm so grateful that I'm his mom and that we get to spend so much time together. Love that baby!

Vicki and Jamie came for the humidities!

A couple weeks ago Vicki & Jamie (Tyler's mom and sister) called us with the exciting news that they were coming to Florida the first week of August! They work for the same company in Utah and were needed to train some new employees in a new Fort Lauderdale office from Monday - Friday. So luckily we were able to spend lots of time with them while they were in our neck of the woods! They flew into Orlando the weekend before and we were able to do some shopping with Vicki and gave Jamie a little Windermere tour. (too bad it was like 95 degrees with lots of "humidities"!)

After hanging out up here they got a rental car and drove down to work on Monday morning. Tyler arranged his schedule to also be down in South Florida for a couple days that week, so Jackson, Tyler and I drove down on Wednesday to be with them. We stayed at the same hotel and hung out in the evenings. We all drove back up to Orlando on Friday after work.
Wednesday night a huge storm blew through South Florida, which would explain our lack of pictures and not so hot appearance on Lincoln Ave in South Beach that night. We had to hide in an Apple Store for a while waiting for it to start pounding down rain!

The next day the weather cleared up nicely and we had a bit of a different view from our hotel!

Jackson was so goofy and giggly all week with his family - i loved it!

Our amazing meals at Seasons 52 - Ty was excited to show them our fav place out here!

We all drove back up to Orlando on Friday after work. On Saturday we attempted to go to DisneyWorld but didn't last too long since it was so stinkin hot! We did go to Hollywood Studios and Epcot and got to do some good rides of course :-)

We loved Rock'N Rollercoaster!



Jackson is so smitten with both Jamie and his Grandma. It was so much fun having them here and we're hoping to see them come out for work again soon!

Slacking

I just realized that I've been a pretty bad blogger this summer. Ever since our big California trip in June I haven't blogged much or even done much. Actually July probably wasn't one of my favorite months. I had a friend say, "it's been a rough month for you hasn't it!" Jackson was sick for the three weeks off and on. Between shots, Roseola, 5 new teeth, and many sleepless nights, 2 trips to the doctor, one drive to the hospital (didn't end up going in bc he finally fell asleep at 5 am) it wasn't the best time for the Jennings. Luckily he's better and has been such a great little boy lately :-)

Another issue we had in July was ants...in our house. I really hadn't had a problem with bugs since moving to Florida until this month. I have never seen a cockroach and have only gotten a few mosquito bites, not much different than living out west. But when we got back from Cali there were dead ants all over our bathroom and kitchen. We had to have a pest control company come destroy nests and spray our house 4 different times before they finally went away! I haven't seen any new ones for about 2 weeks now. And it's so nice to not have to vaccuum my bathroom several times a day getting rid of the nasty things.

Jackson and I didn't leave Orlando once during July, which is super rare for us - you'd think in the summer we'd have stuff going on but we have just been here braving out this crazy heat. For some reason this summer weather is bothering me a lot more than the past 2 years. It's just so dang humid this year and I really have no desire to leave the house some days. Jackson is getting a little bit better swimming and has shown more interest in playing in the water which has been good. But he's still much happier running around the backyard, the only problem is the poor kid sweats like a man and starts dripping after about 2 minutes!

But now it's one week into August and I need to try to enjoy this summer while it lasts! We did go to DisneyWorld a few times (only for a few hours at a time trying to avoid the heat!) multiple swimming trips, shopping excursions, saw the final harry potter (which i wanted to dedicate a blog post to entirely ... maybe some day), and good times with friends. At this point I hear Jackson waking up from his nap and I have no new pictures uploaded on my computer. So this will be a quick post but I'm going to plan on uploading and blogging about our fun week with Tyler's Mom and sister, Jamie coming to visit us after the buddy goes to bed tonight :-)

Faces

I captured these photos while Jackson watched Yo Gabba Gabba a few days ago. The time from 1-12 is probably about 45 seconds. I showed Tyler last night and he said, blog it. So here it is.




Between his many faces and constant sound effects, it's pretty easy for us to figure out what this little guy is thinking!

Fourth

Oh yeah - the Fourth of July, just 2 weeks later. Honestly it was not one of our fondest fourths. It was actually our first one spent in Orlando, but didn't go as well as we'd planned. Jackson was really sick all weekend and none of us had slept well the night before so it wasn't the most joyous of occasions! But we did a little swimming, bbqing with friends, and watched the Disney Fireworks with friends from our new church building.


Jackson loves getting balloons every time we go to the grocery store!




Ready for our bbq.



He loved his little flag!

I'm realizing these pictures are pretty lame but with a super sad baby I was lucky to get these! Jackson is normally such a happy kid that it is such a transformation when he's sick! You can tell from his face in this one!


But there was a beautiful sunset that weekend!


One of the coolest things of the weekend was when I saw a herron kill and eat a snake in our backyard!

At the end of the video is when it started swallowing the thing! It was so crazy watching it, hopefully in a few more months Jackson can enjoy it with me a little bit more!

THE Disney Day

Monday, June 27th might be the most well executed Disneyland Day with a group of 12 adults and 3 babies in history. No lies. It was near perfect. Obviously Tyler and I have a lot of experience at the Florida Parks and can guarantee a great experience with ride time maximization and wait time minimization, but at Disneyland we were on foreign ground. But we definitely conquered!

I grew up going to Disneyland, but hadn't been for 9 years. Tyler hadn't been for 20 years. We have often talked about Disneyland but since we have passes out here in Florida, we didn't think we'd go for years. But that all changed when the Jennings family decided to go for our final day in Cali. Everyone looked to me and Tyler (ok mostly Tyler) to guide them through the park, so the night before we did a quick overview of the rides and went in with a good game plan. We planned to maximize on our fast passes but also the lovely little bonus of having 3 babies would allow us to get 3 "rider switch" passes for all the big rides.

Tyler's mom bought the tickets through a broker and so we had to leave extra early to pick them up beforehand. We had thought they were passes to just Disneyland alone, but when we showed up to buy them at 7:30 am we found out they were park hoppers, allowing us to go to California Adventure too! We were all so excited for this extra bonus, but immediately Tyler and I started discussing a change in plans to our plan of attack for the day haha.

Anyways, here is the good stuff. We got to the park and Tyler immediately ran over to Indiana Jones to get us all fast passes, and the rest of us stopped to take a picture.


Then we all ran over to Matterhorn and the madness began! We were able to ride all the big rides (Matterhorn, Space Mountain, Indiana Jones, Thunder Mountain, and Splash Mountain) all before 11:45 am. We didn't have to wait in any lines, since we got fast passes and rider switches for all of them!

Here we are after getting soaked on Splash Mountain!


Oh and we also were able to ride Storybook Canal Rides, Finding Nemo Submarine, and Pirates of the Caribbean all together with the babies. All before 11:45 - do you realize how crazy that is? Well it was.

We had one of the largest groups ever on that tiny boat haha!


In line waiting for Pirates.


Then from noon to 3 we all split up and did our own thing at Disneyland. During that time Reese was able to meet all the princesses in Fantasyland and was totally in heaven! Some of us who waited behind with the babies went back and rode the big rides with others for a second time, we went on the Haunted Mansion, got some lunch, and then got all 3 of the babies to sleep in their strollers!


Then we headed over to California Adventure to do some of the big rides over there. Sneaky Tyler had actually ran over during our break and gotten fast passes for Soarin and the Screamin Roller Coaster. So ... we went right to Soarin and all 5 Jennings kids and their spouses rode it together while Grandma and Grandpa stayed outside with the babies. When we got off the ride we found them all awake and having so much fun together!

After soarin we went and got fast passes for the Tower of Terror and while we waited for our time slot, we all hung out in the Bugs Life area. There is nothing like that in Florida so it was fun to see and go on rides with the babies for a little bit! Probably the cutest moment was when all 3 grandkids rode a spinny ride with Grandma and Grandpa together in their car.


Then most of the crew rode tower of terror and some of us headed over to Toy Story Mania. And can someone please explain to me why there is no fast pass line for this ride? It's Tyler's favorite ride at all of DisneyWorld so we couldn't leave it out, but the line was over an hour! There wasn't a way to work the system sadly. But we were able to rotate in and out of line while some people rode the roller coaster and got some well needed refreshments!

Jackson had fun giving kisses to everyone in line, he and Avery got pretty "close" on this trip haha!


But Toy Story Maina was a lot of fun, I rode with Alise and she did so awesome! I hope everyone was glad we rode it (I know Scott was, he and Tyler were able to ride it twice because of rider/baby swap!) After our California Adventures some of us made it over to the parade at DisneyLand and some of us just took our time leaving the park.



After all this we were exhausted! We considered staying later and going back to ride more in Disneyland since the park didn't close til 1 am I think but by about 7 we (and the babies) were all ready to go. We had done it all anyways!


We're so grateful to Vicki for allowing us all to go! We had such an amazing trip that we will remember forever! Avery and Reese both did so good, they will be experts when they come to Florida! We rode for his gluuuuhr!