Quality Family Time...in a Parking Lot

The last time the kids and I rode with my mom down to her place in Central FL, we decided to meet-up with my little sis for the day at Disney World.

The kids had a great time, even though it was pretty crowded, and my sister and I got a chance to catch up while Granny spoiled the grandkids. Bella and Marshall watched the light parade thanks to their super-nice parents holding them up above the crowd (I must note that little kids' weight seems to multiply exponentially while holding them up this way!) and after the fireworks, we said goodbye to Aunt Chrissy and mom, me and the kiddos went to do one last ride before we too, headed out before the second parade of the night started, in order to beat the crowds to our car.

We did manage to get out of the park just before of the start of the second parade (it had to be a pretty funny site, Mom and I trying not to run as we noticed the Main Street lights go off and heard the parade music starting. I was thinking of the bible story about Lot's wife the whole way as I was repeating under might breath "Don't look back, don't look back" and hoping against hope the kids would not turn around to realize what was going was starting right behind us). Luck was on our side (or so we thought) and we made it out of the park with the kiddos none the wiser as far as that second parade was concerned.

We quickly got on the ferry and made our way back to the Ticket and Transportation Center to catch a tram (no lines b/c everyone was still watching the parade) back to our car.

As we get to the car, it's well after 11pm and we are really tired; even Marshall was asking for milk (which at this time of the night is code for "I want to go to bed"). And that's when things got really interesting. My mom caouldn't find her keys. My mom, the queen of great organizing ideas and neat little organizing gadgets, who always has her keys hooked on a carabiner (sp?) on her purse strap, can't find her keys. Turns out, she had taken them off the strap to move them to "safety" insider her purse - to make sure she didn't loose them. We guessed they must have fallen out at some point during the day. Now what?!?!?

So, off I go to find help. A ride on the tram to find a Disney Security officer led us to Disney Security manager who galantly offered to drive to the Lost and Found at the Magic Kingdom to retrieve the missing keys for us (instead of making us go through all the trams, boats, etc it takes to get back to Magic Kingdom). To keep entertained, Granny and Marsahll rode on the tram until the tram service shut down for the night (at this point it was well past midnight) and then we huddled in the empty parking lot to wait for our night-in-shining-uniform to arrive with the keys. When she did, we hugged her, thanked her and prompty headed home.

Working Out The Bugs...On Us!

The Great Wolf Lodge is a brand new hotel. When we were there, it had only been open a couple of months, so they were still working out some of the bugs. And, because we seem to be a magnet for this kind of experience, they worked out some of those bugs on us! Here is the story.

We flew into Dallas a couple of nights before the actual reunion so we could spend a day with William's Grandpa who lives in the area. To make things easier on ourselves (less moving around with the kids) we just decided to book two extra nights at The Great Wolf Lodge and day trip to Grandpa's house from there. So, on the day everyone else was supposed to arrive for the reunion, we got up early and took the kids to the water park for a while. They had a blast all morning and a little after noon, we headed back to the room to eat lunch and take a nap. We dripped our way up the elevator to the third floor (note the floor number, as this will be important later) and down the hallway to our door, only to find that we were locked out.

Of course, it is at this point in the story that Marshall tells us he has to go to the potty "real bad", complete with one of those panic-stricken looks on his face. Thankfully Aunt Cleta and Uncle Joe were only a few rooms down from us (they had arrived a day or two early as well) so we rushed down to their room hoping against hope that someone would be in there and...hooray! we got lucky!

Marshall borrowed their bathroom and then a not-so-happy Mom set off to find someone to help us get into our room. Finally, I found a janitor who found a housekeeper who found a housekeeping supervisor who was able to tell us were were locked out because we were supposed to have checked out by noon.

What?!?

By this point, Mom had transitioned from not-so-happy to completely irate as I was escorted into my room to phone the front desk to sort out the mess (while, I might add, my family continued to drip in the hallway). The friendly front desk clerk let me know they had checked us out of our room and were moving us to the third floor to be closer to the other reunion Belks.

What?!?

Yes, you remember correctly, we were already on the third floor! After I gently (ok, maybe not so gently) pointed that out, they said we could stay in our room, we just needed to bring our keys down to the front desk to be re-activated. I took keys down to then find they couldn't activate our keys without our ID's - which happened to be upstairs in the safe of the room we were currently locked out of! I think the manager could sense I was crossing the line between irate and ready-to-scream and decided that maybe I could answer a few security questions to prove who I was and have the keys re-activated.

So, with my new keys in hand, I again dripped back up to our room, although this time, without any kids or gear to wrangle, I was painfully aware that I was walking all over a really nice hotel barefoot and in nothing but a swimsuit.

Did I learn anything from this experience? Yes. I really need to get a swimsuit cover-up! :)

Vacation Part 3: The Great Wolf Lodge

The last part of our vacation was the Belk Family Reunion at The Great Wolf Lodge in Grapevine, TX. The Lodge is actually a hunting lodge themed hotel that has a big indoor/outdoor water park in the middle of it. We had great weather for water parking - sunny and low humidity, yay! Its a great concept, you can walk to the water park and easily come back to the room (complete with fridge and microwave) for lunch and naps, and they have lots of shops and restaurants, all keeping with the lodge theme - kind of like Disney World, but without the need for buses to take you from place to place.

They also have something called Magi Quest (I hope I am getting this right) for the kids to play throughout the hotel. It was kind of like a hi-tech scavenger hunt. You can buy a Harry Potter type wand and then you go on "quests" to find things (treasure chests, crystals, etc.) placed all over the hotel. When you would wave your wand at the items, they would light up and say things like "You have found the Red Crystal". The kiddos absolutely loved this! Everywhere you went, kids were waving wands at paintings and statues. And even more funny, was that if you had already found an item and tried to "find" it again, instead of "You have found the Red Crystal" you would get something like, "Don't you have anything better to do than to stand around all day waving that wand?"

All in all, it was a really fun place to vacation. Addison Marshall is already asking when we can go back and walks around singing their theme song (it was playing outside the entrance so everytime you went through the entrance you had to, I mean had the opportunity to, hear it. :)

Vacation Part 2: Grandpa's House

Part 2 of our vacation had us traveling from Portland, OR to Dallas, TX to visit Grandpa and Grandma Molly. Addison Marshall was really looking forward to this part of the trip because he knew where there is Grandpa, there is an afternoon of fishing! Marshall and Dad had tried their hand at fishing a few times at William's work but they never caught anything (and let me tell you...for a 3 year old, the thrill of fishing is definitely NOT about relaxing and enjoying nature, its about results and that means fish! :)

Unfortunately for us, there are not many fish in the lake near Grandpa's house this summer. The local fishermen theorize that all the fish larvae were washed away during the flooding they had last year and no larvae = nothing to grow into fish. So...we spent a while casting, catching crickets, and playing with Grandpa and Grandma Molly's dog. Then, having caught no fish for dinner, we headed into town for some Chick-fil-A.

Southern Naming Conventions

I have gotten a few questions from folks we haven't talked to in a while about our oldest son's name....so here's the story.

We moved to Alabama a year and a half ago and Addison and I quickly got involved with some mom's groups and preschool activities in town. As we met child after child, it quickly became evident that many, many kids here are called by both their first and middle names. Anna Claire, Sarah Kate, Anna Grace, Lydia Grace, Mary Kelly, Katie Margaret, John Martin, and on and on it goes. So, as you can imagine, it wasn't long before Addison started asking to be called by "all his names". And when he said "all my names", he meant all of them, including his last name, which I was not going to do (Addison Marshall Belk is too long to say AND I would sound ridiculous in the grocery store! :).

Honestly, the two names request wasn't really a battle that was worth fighting as far as I was concerned (we gave both of the kids first and middle names that we liked alot), so we agreed to a compromise. Mom and Dad would to try to remember to call him "Addison Marshall", all the while thinking this was just a phase that would eventually pass. Well, "eventually" never came. We've been calling him "Addison Marshall" for almost a year now and he hasn't really gotten tired of it. To complicate things further, Baby Jack arrived and started calling him something that sounds kind of like "Mar-Mar", so William and I eventually started calling him Marshall more often. Now even Granny has started calling him Marshall sometimes and last week at VBS, when we couldn't fit "Addison Marshall" on the nametag, I asked him what he wanted me to write and he said, "Just Marshall".

I am not really sure how this story ends, probably only time will tell, but for the meantime, in our blog, as in our real lives, we will go back and forth between all his names, just to keep you on your toes.

I am grateful his middle name isn't Edgar.

Vacation Part 1: Oregon

We just took our family vacation for 2008 and boy, it was a big one. At times I thought we had bitten off a little more than we could chew.






We started with a very long airplane ride from Alabama to Portland, OR to stay with some friends for the first half of the week. The remainder of the week we would spend at a family reunion outside of Dallas, TX (this plan made lots of sense when the family reunion was going to be held in Utah...).


Fortunately AND unfortunately for us, the winter weather that had plagued Portland well into the spring had cleared up just in time for our arrival, but it brought with it the horrible allergy symptoms that come with that beautiful landscape "waking up". No kidding, $70 of allergy medicines later we felt a little better (I think the pharmacist was actually scared to sell me everything I wanted to buy since I had started the conversation with "How much of this can I take at one time without killing myself?"). With the help of the medicine (thank you Dr. Bush!), we were able to spend some great time catching up with lots of friends inside and out. :)








When it came time to leave, it was very hard to say goodbye, both for us and the kids. Addison Marshall didn't really understand that Diego wasn't coming to the family reunion with us (he kept talking about Diego coming on a different plane).


On the way to Part 2 of our vacation, William and I had a few quiet moments (the kids were asleep) to think about how much God had blessed us with our move to Portland.

We had asked for two things - good friends and a good church. He came through on both counts.

Newest Member of Our Family

I will be the first to admit that I am not a dog person. In fact, I am not really an animal person at all. I just don't like the licking, the smell, the poop to clean up, the responsibility (what do you do with the animal when you go on vacation), the claws, the jumping, and (for me) the list goes on and on.

So, you can imagine how I felt when a stray puppy decided to make our back porch her new home. For about a week, we didn't feed it (hoping she would eventually find her way back home for food) and tried to keep the kids from playing with it, while I called the Humane Society, Animal Control, and all the local vets to see if anyone was looking for a lost dog (or could take one in). Dad and Addison Marshall walked up and down our street, knocking on neighbors' doors, to see if anyone knew who she belonged to. All of these efforts yielded nothing, nada, zip. This combined with the fact that the dog had no collar, led us to believe that no one was looking for her.

Now we were faced with the decision of what to do. The kids had lost two pets a couple of weeks before, a fire-bellied toad named Fango, and a lizard Dad and Marshall had caught in the yard and caged, named Mr. Lizard, and the kids regularly enjoyed playing with the dogs available for adoption at PetSmart on the weekends. And even before this dog showed up, Marshall had been asking me for "another pet frog, a lizard, or..........maybe a puppy?".

So....at this point you can probably figure out how this story ends. Mommy melted, Daddy and Marshall cheered, Jack squealed and our family spent an obsence amount of money to have the dog spayed and given shots while we were on vacation.

When we got home, we let Marshall have the honor of naming her. After reviewing a list of female Disney character names we found on the internet, he decided to name her Meg, after the black-haired heroine in the Hercules book and she is the newest member of our family.