Dave is a Decade

Hard to believe this guy is 10 already! Here's a look at Dave through the years on his birthdays :)

How did that itty baby get so big!??
















Ike had to get in on Dave's birthday photo shoot.














For his birthday Dave wanted to have his friends over for a sleepover again, which is fine by me! His friends are all great kids and they have so much fun together!

No sleepover is complete without a visit to the campus pool.

Ready for cake!
















Speaking of cake, this was a hot mess!













Dave had requested marshmallow icing and I am just not that great with working with it yet. First of all my food coloring gel was super old so the "red" just turned the icing pink. So I decided to make it look like a Voodoo donut that we had on vacation in Universal. However, the cake started cracking so I stuck it in the fridge and Josh helped me prop it up.

Not my prettiest cake, but it still tasted good!













For entertainment at the party I looked up some of those old Minute to Win It games. Always a hit and the supplies are pretty easy!

Moving ping pong balls with a spoon.

Here's a video of them moving cotton balls with their noses covered in vaseline. 












As for Dave's likes and dislikes currently:

Still all-in on Fortnite. Josh and the boys play on his days off and they have so much fun. I don't get it at all but I'm glad they have something to bond over :)

He's been re-reading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series lately. He asked for the whole set for Christmas even! Also still enjoying the Dog Man books (a new one comes out every 6 months).

He had a good season playing basketball in town. It was really competitive which was great for Dave and he said he had a lot of fun.

Dave continues to wake up at the crack of dawn every day-he's up by 6:15 at the latest every single day. I always want to include this tidbit for when he finally sleeps in as a teenager (fingers crossed!).

He has gotten back into building legos in the last year. Especially the architect series-he's getting several for Christmas so he's gonna be busy over break!

I think his favorite TV show right now is Amazing World of Gumball. We watched it a lot over vacation this summer and I see him watching it pretty frequently now.

Favorite music is mostly Christian hip hop or whatever indie music Josh is listening to at the moment. Currently it's this song Cringe-they play it on repeat!


That's all I can think of for now-I'm sure I'll think of something else later :) Dave is truly a joy in our lives and definitely keeps us on our toes.

More Universal Days

We started off early again on Wednesday. As I mentioned before we definitely preferred doing this and then getting done pretty early in the day and relaxing the rest of the time.








Men in Black.

The boys were so cute in their robes.

Practicing for the Hagrid ride.















If anyone reading this is going to Universal make sure you check out Knockturn Alley in Diagon Alley. It is so cool and there were lots of trick with the interactive wands!

Pteranodon fliers.














I wanted to go ride Hulk (which Ike was super duper bummed he couldn't ride) so as we were leaving I went to do that while mom took the kids on the log ride that got you soaked. We figured since we were leaving anyway they may as well do it then! Well as it turns out I checked the Universal app after I got off the Hulk and the wait time for the new Hagrid ride was lower than it had been yet. So I convinced mom and the kids to suffer through with wet clothes so we could ride it.  The 90 minute wait only ended up taking 60 minutes so it was worth it!

Waiting in line, the theming was really cool.

The kids made us ride in the side cars. So kind of them.

Definitely everybody's favorite ride at Universal!

Dave and She-Ra.













We were very glad we got to ride the new ride on Wednesday...our plan was to get up really early on Thursday and try to get to it first. The lines for doing that were around 2 hours so this was a huge improvement to that!

After we left the kids swam again and hung out with their new British friend Conner. There were tons of people from Europe and Australia-it was fun to hear all the accents everywhere.




Thursday we met up with the Getz family for one more hurrah in Diagon Alley.









Kids with Stan Shunpike and the Knight bus.


















We loved seeing the Getz crew!

One last group picture in Diagon Alley.
















The kids were really excited about getting this lanyards-Josh's parents gave them each some spending money and they deliberated long and hard on what to get!













Friday morning my mom left for her flight pretty early so the kids and I hung out with her until she left then we got all of our stuff together and checked our bags with the front desk before heading to the parks one more time.

Breakfast at the Leaky Cauldron.













Ike really wanted to ride the Mummy one more time and Dave was a great sport and went with us again. He did not enjoy this ride but it was so nice of him to do it again for his brother!

For whatever reason the kids didn't want to take the train to Islands of Adventure so we started walking back out the front of the park to get around and realized that the ET ride was open (it opens late every day so we missed it all the other days).

It was a really fun ride!














Then we walked around the more kiddy area for a little bit and met a bunch of characters.

Getting this picture brought me so much joy. Dave used to love watching Dora!

Bumblebee.

Found Popeye walking down the road.













We walked over to Hogsmeade again and bought some candy before heading out through the Marvel world.

Wolverine.














The kids swam for about a half hour back at the hotel but it started storming and they kicked everybody out. We decided we'd just go ahead and start for the airport and that went super smooth. Usually we have to wait forever at MCO but there was basically no line through security so that was awesome.

Ready for our flight!
















We had such a fantastic trip but we were all excited to get home and see Josh and to relax a bit before school and work started up again. Once we finished with Disney we didn't overdo it any other day but it was still a lot of walking and being out in the heat!

I cannot thank my mom enough for suggesting we go and providing most of the funding! We are already talking about going again in 5 years when the kids are older. I am totally down for that :)

Universal Studios First Days

On Monday we moved hotels to Endless Summer which is a budget hotel on Universal grounds. We really loved it-it is brand new and they thought of everything! It was also so nice being a quick bus ride to the park vs the long drive to the Disney parks. Since we had 5 day passes we went into the parks in the afternoon to get the lay of the land and meet up with the Getz family.








Dr. Seuss ride. Couldn't resist!

Dave, Ike and Alec posing with the Hogwarts Express.

The boys really wanted to try out the interactive wands so we went to one of wand ceremonies hoping someone in our group would get picked for the demonstration. Dave got picked!

Ollivander's was so cool.

Dave getting measured for his wand. They put on a whole show of trying out wands and certain ones not working right. It was pretty funny.











After we walked around the Wizarding World a little we took the train over to the other park and went on the Simpson's ride.

With Homer and Bart.

Back to the hotel to swim!


































Tuesday we got up pretty early since we had early morning access to the Universal side. We wanted to hit the Harry Potter stuff on that side before it got too crowded. This was a great strategy so we continued with it the rest of the trip. We were usually done with the parks by around 1 every day doing this.









Outside King's Cross.

Gringotts dragon.

The line for the Gringotts ride was so cool.

We all loved this ride!

Ike and I loved the Mummy ride! We rode it so many times during our trip.















We rode most of the rides on the Universal side to headed over to the Islands of Adventure via the Hogwarts Express.

The castle from Hogsmeade.











We rode the Jurassic Park ride, Kong, and then since we were heading back to our hotel for a while we rode the log ride and proceeded to get drenched.

These ride pictures are pure gold.

We went back to the hotel and rested and swam for a bit. Then we headed back to the parks to meet up with the Getz family for dinner and viewing of the light show.

Dinner at the Three Broomsticks. Ike had to get a butterbeer!

Dave and Alec enjoying their feasts.













We rode the Forbidden Journey and the Flight of the Hippogriff before dinner and then went on another round of Forbidden Journey while my mom and Rich got us spots for the light show. They were the true champions of the day-we had a fantastic spot!

The Dark Arts light show was AMAZING.

We sure packed in a lot of stuff in 1.5 days! We still had two full days left at this point which was so great because we got to ride all of our favorite stuff again and really explore!