Day 1 Flashback!

Someone (Thanks, Penny) dropped the idea for me to post about one day of our trip every day…that way I didn’t have to post a monstrously long, exhaustingly boring, bad-family-vacation-movie-from-last-year’s-trip-to-wally-world type post….instead I can stretch out the torture for a whole week!

Peyton’s doing ok today, she’s slept a lot…we did wear her pretty much OUT during the GKTW trip…plus she got her big dose of chemo on Monday….and we didn’t get to sleep until 4AM this morning with our middle of the night hospital run. Today her temp has yo-yo’d…. but for the most part it’s been decent….although I expect that it’ll start to raise as the evening wears on. She always gets her fevers in the evenings. She’s in a good mood and just watching movies and coloring.

I’ve spent the down time organizing my pictures from the trip and trying to figure out the best way to display the pictures. I think I’ll just post a couple from each day and then I’m putting together a slideshow of “The best of the GKTW”.

Day 1 – Thursday

We arrived at Give Kids The World bursting with excitement. We were shown to our villa for the week and were just awed by accommodations. The housing is set up like a subdivision full of duplexes and we were in one perfectly behind all the main buildings with easy walking access to everything. It was an awesome little house with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room and kitchen….as the kids put it “This is nicer than OUR house!” The kids had a bathroom that was just about the size of their bedroom here, with huge shower and Jacuzzi tub, they were thrilled. There was a huge gift basket on the table with a specially made Give Kids The World version of Candy Land, stuffed animals, toys, candy, and chips. We spent a few minutes getting unpacked and settled in and then promptly ditched it all and headed for the pool. We then hit the ice cream parlor…we were dedicated to our mission to try EVERY flavor before we left for home….we came darn close!

Thursday nights at GKTW is always Christmas. We were blown away to head to dinner and see that in a matter of hours the entire place had been transformed into a huge Christmas party! Every tree was full of ornaments and there were decorations everywhere. There was face painting, a magician, horse-drawn carriage rides…but most importantly, in the Castle of Miracles, Santa was there to see every family and each child was able to pick out a Christmas present. We had a traditional Christmas turkey dinner that night and, of course, ice cream for dessert….you may notice that this is a common theme throughout our stay…ice cream for dessert, ice cream for fun, ice cream because it’s hot, ice cream because we CAN! Doug Powell made a firm commitment “Ten Pounds in 6 Days”…I’m pretty sure we all met that goal.

In the evening it decided to pour and I went to the orientation where we got bunches of goodies, plus our theme park tickets for the week. They gave us 3 days at Disney parks, 2 days at Universal Parks, and 1 at Sea World. One of the benefits of living so close to Orlando is that we weren’t under any pressure to use those tickets this week the way so many families who live in other states were. Those poor families were trying to cram in 6 days of theme parks and still partake of all the fun to be had at GKTW…I’m sure many just collapse as soon as they get home, possibly in the baggage drop-off at the airport.

I’m completely unable to explain how happy we were to be there. If you can imagine Christmas morning, your birthday and the best party you’ve ever been to…roll it all into one big ball of “YAHOO” and that’s about how giddy we all were.

f.r.o.G…fully relying on God
–Anissa