Sunshine State

We spent the past two weeks in Florida to visit two churches and numerous individual supporters.  We left Michigan as snow lightly fell to the ground and arrived to Florida's heat and humidity.  What a welcomed change!

We were constantly visiting people and moving every few nights from place to place.  It was great to see familiar friends and family.  

 

Cocoa Beach on the Atlantic Ocean where we met friends from Grace CRC

Abigail's "twin", Katie, from Bradenton CRC

Gritter family outside Orlando

 

Ullom family south of Orlando

Matthew and Andrew at Bradenton CRC

Swimming no matter what the temperature - this water was COLD!

Elizabeth was usually the first one to jump in the pool

Matthew and Daddy tackle the waves of the Gulf of Mexico

Since our busiest days are over the weekends, we took our "weekends" in-between the two Sundays and spent 4 days at Disney's resort (thanks to a generous gift from George's mom and step-dad)!!!  Surprisingly, we managed to be there on the slowest week of the month.  We had one day at Hollywood Studios and hardly had to wait in any lines.

About to enter the Star Tours ride - our family's favorite attraction!

Matthew and Abigail participate in Jedi Training Academy

Abigail defeats Darth Vader

Matthew fearlessly faces the enemy

All three playing in Honey I Shrunk the Kids playground

Thanks to my cousin's son working at Legoland and giving us free entrance, we spent a warm day riding roller-coasters (Elizabeth was SO GLAD she was tall enough) and cooling off in the water park.

Enjoying Legoland with family

Amazing sights built all out of legos!

Not so scary when he's built out of bricks

AHHH... he looks scary!

On Saturday we had a bit of time to go to the Everglades and introduce the kids to alligators!  It was so terribly hot that after they saw a few of them, they didn't care about seeing any more and just wanted to get back into the air conditioned car.

There were 9 alligators that I could count when I took this picture but only 6 fit in the viewfinder

Let's pass by on the other side of this path!

No fear!

What a great trip to Florida!  We're back in Michigan now and it's supposed to snow later this week.  Ugh....  The kids are back to school and George wraps up his time in the US.  He leaves in 3 short weeks!  We have exciting news about our return to Kyiv, but I'll save that for another post.