The Wandering Beaver: A Week in Kissimmee

On Friday the 11th, we headed 85 miles over for a week at Sherwood Forest RV in Kissimmee, Florida. The 11th was also my last day of full-time work, only 4 hours a day from here on out!

Another big milestone from that weekend? We officially have a teenager - Porter's 13th birthday was that Sunday.

Morning Snuggles

For his birthday he wanted to go snorkeling, but since we were in the middle of Florida (read: no oceans) we opted to postpone that and instead we went to Kissimmee Go-Karts. It was a lot of fun - racing go-karts, a full arcade, and they have alligators you can feed!

Bring it!

The weather was beautiful the entire week so we were able to spend lots of time at the pool and the boys got in a few games of outdoor chess.

Seriously strategizing going on here

It's always been our tradition that we decorate for Christmas after Porter's birthday. We like to keep the two separate in the hopes that he never feels like his big day is anyway overshadowed.

We didn't really bring much in the way of Christmas decorations with us though, so we ended up having to grab quite a bit of stuff in order to decorate.

Sidewalk chalk trees count, right?

This is the first year since our boys were born that we haven't made a day out of going up to the snow and picking out a tree. It was definitely a bitter sweet thing - especially when the tree this year was a pre-lit fake thing. I really do think it turned out well though!

Isn't she cute?

And I did bring our stockings - but with no fireplace mantle, we opted to hang them in the window :)

And the stocking we hung...

Thanks to a good deal on Groupon, we went to see the Pirate's Dinner Adventure. If you've ever been to a Medieval Times - same thing, but with pirates. It was a lot of fun and they even had an entire gluten free dinner and desert for Porter!

Hudson rowing his heart out

Pirates sing, right?

We considered doing the amusement park thing while we were just outside of Orlando. But we just couldn't justify spending almost a thousand dollars to spend hours standing in lines. Especially when neither of the kids seemed to really care about it. We did opt to head over to Disney Springs for a few hours on the 17th though. Just to get a little Disney feel.

On the 18th we drove 149 south to the Southbay Campground. It was just a stopover point, but we really enjoyed it. It was nice and quiet - which isn't something you can really say about the Orlando area.