We always enjoy a bit of a quiet Valentine's Day - avoiding the restaurant crowds and just bringing take-out home for the whole family to enjoy - and afterwards we exchange cards all snuggled up on a single couch (which the space is getting markedly smaller as these children continue to grow so quickly! 💜)
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| Love this family! |
A dear friend Vasti also has her birthday the week, and we had the joy of going out for a women's ceramics painting to celebrate her! Such a special friend over the years, Amy has been blessed by her depth of knowledge, thoughtful insights and lots of fun memories!
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| Hard at work on our various items! |
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| And the finished products! |
President's Day Weekend allowed us to have a long weekend, which is always super fun and Amy is loathe to let one go by without having some fun activities, so we launched the weekend by inviting some of Addison's closer 4th grade friends over for a Friday afternoon playdate. Very fun to have Devin, Michael, Liam and Olivia over, along with of course Erik and Elin
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| A few of the friends already here in the pool |
That Sunday, Amy took Erik, Elin and Addison to Disney - mostly so that they could continue their pin trading collection and have the fun of trading pins for free at Disney - and along the way we enjoyed some rides of course -- and saw beautiful flowering trees!
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| Examining all of the pins that they could trade for |
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| Isn't this tree beautiful!? |
Speaking of Disney, Kaleb has been wanting to go to Hollywood Studios to see the new Star Wars rides, so Amy took Kaleb, Addison and Evan over there one afternoon. It was a cool day so that made it nice not to swelter. We figured out the "solo rider" line was the way to go and rode the main Stars Wars ride like 3 times in the space of about 30-40 minutes which was amazing -- although we didn't all sit in the same ride it still was way better than the 80 minute wait for one ride. Yahoo!
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| Star Wars land behind us |
While the boys went to Tower of Tower, Addison and Amy went to the Beauty and the Beast live show and then she did some acrobatic moves while waiting for the boys to come back.
We had a fun time over the weekend to go to the Rich Aguilar Dinosaur show at the church - it was really interesting to hear some of the facts and learn about references to dragons in the Bible - it will be interesting to learn in heaven if the dragons were dinosaurs, or just how the history played itself out.
In other news, Amy's job has changed at work. She was previously the CFO over the areas outside of the actual hospital (medical groups, urgent care, imaging, hospice, home care, rehab, lab, pharmacy, population health, and Institute strategy). Company leaders streamlined the org structure and now she will serve as the Northwest hospital market CFO - with a daily seat at Winter Garden as the CFO and oversight over Altamonte and Apopka, plus for now she will keep some of the outpatient areas such as medical group, imaging, rehab, lab, pharmacy and ASCs. It has been a fun change with lots of new learning opportunities -- and frankly the stress is less so it is a huge win/win.
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| The new office - lovely full windows! |
The church held a "Braids and Brunch" event recently in which you could come with your daughters and learn how to braid hair - fancy things like Dutch braids, fish tails and of course the regular French braid. it was fun to go and learn - Amy has never done a Dutch braid before and it turned out decent! Now to just keep practicing - it is hard during the week as there isn't much time in the mornings!
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| The two girls giving it a try on their mamas |
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| Not too bad! |
FLEC has been having some fun extra events lately - complete with some special chapels on Friday that grandparents can come too along with Southern Acros team coming down. Addison got in the phone of the Acros team and tried some balancing moves - that is right up her alley climbing up onto the top of the shoulders of one of the gymnasts!
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| No fear this one! |
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| Good job balancing! |
She also had the opportunity to help participate in leading out in one of the chapels when she and two other boys were able to read the Pledge of Allegiance.
Grandma and Grandpa have been able to come to a fair number of Friday chapels at her request - what a fortunate family we are to have involved, active grandparents here in town - we are blessed!
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| Even Mom got to come one week! |
And one Friday chapel had a special treat with Miss Jennifer being able to go and sit with the boys - always nice to have a second mom there!
And finally we darted over to FLA to their Food Festival - it was our first time and we were wowed. Such great food to try, and because we went late the food was all on sale and we got to try twice as much! Who doesn't love Italian food, and we do love Matt and Deanna who were the servers at the time. Yummy and the decorations were great
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