The announcement!

We finally let the kids in on our little secret. As we had waited almost until the last minute, we couldn't just blurt out that we were going to Disney World - so Danielle created some tickets and invitations written from different Disney Characters and dropped these in the mail box for the kids to receive.

After we had done most of our plans for the day, Saturday, Danielle mentioned that she thought she heard a weird mail truck, playing loud music, pull up and put something in our mailbox.  Dawson loves to get the mail so he readily wanted to go out and get the "mail".  As he was bringing it in, we asked Noah to help him with seeing who the mail was for - since he was playing his Nintendo DS though, he very begrudgingly agreed to help Dawson.   When he had the envelopes in his hand, he read the names on each and gave them out to each of them.  His attitude became a little more enthusiastic as they all had gotten some mail.

They went into the other room and we had them sit on the couch while they opened their mail.  The first thing they all pulled out was their ticket to ride an airplane.   If you ever saw the movie Polar Express, their tickets looked just like the ones in the movie that allowed each passenger to ride the train.  Danielle did a great job with the computer program she used to create these.  In any case, when they pulled these out, they all got really excited that they were going on a "train" ride!  As Noah is learning to read, we had him read his ticket and the excitement rang out as he pronounced "Plane ticket".  It might help to know that over the past month we've been warming them up by seeing if they wanted to ride a plane and when they said "yes" we'd build on the excitement or tell them if they were good - we'd ride on one soon.  Of course, using this we also offered up that we wouldn't go on the plane if they were acting particularly bad any certain day.

We moved onto the invitations and had Noah read his.  With a picture of Mickey Mouse on it, he read "Noah Stegman, All ...of ....us ....here .... at .... D....Di....Dis....ney....Disney  .....DISNEY!!!!"  When he then blurted out "WE'RE GOING TO DISNEY WORLD!!!!!"  With this announcement to the world, there was dancing and screaming with excitement!!  From there we finished reading Noah's invitation and then we read Dawson's and Samantha's invitations.  They were so excited!  We video taped the whole thing and of course we had to have each of them give us their "Super Bowl win comment"   -  "I'm going to Disney World!" 

We have our tickets!  Can we go now?

We asked each of them who they would like to see when they are there and hopefully we'll be able to see one of their favorite characters.   On the top of Noah's list were Donald, Mickey and Pluto.  Dawson wants to see Goofy, Pluto and Mickey.  Sam's first pick was Snow White, than Mickey and Minney --- and all the princesses!   We'll see what we can do.

Checking the weather, it looks like scattered showers Wednesday through Saturday - so we can use any prayers to keep the sun shining while we're there.  Oh yeah, also so that we get up and to the airport in plenty of time.  Flight is early.  Chat with ya soon!