Aquatica
My favorite water park ever is Sea World's Aquatica. With the temperature up in the nineties in Florida, sitting in the water was great. I couldn't ride any of the water slides, but I was completely content sitting at the bottom of the kid slides and watching Annie and Alex slide down.
Alex felt like a big boy this trip. He finally hit the height requirements for a couple of the full sized slides. Shaun and Grandma said he had no problem climbing the six flights of stairs each time for the chance to go down on the adult water slides. He also loved swimming around the rapid river. Since he had his life preserver on he could rocket past the rest of us. It was work to keep up with him.
Annie mastered floating on her back with her life preserver. She did really well on the rapid river floating along. And when she came off a slide and didn't manage to keep her feet planted on the ground, she calmly flipped over and floated until one of us got to her. 
Annie, Alex, and I managed to get great tans at Aquatica, but poor Shaun, who never sees the sun, got burned pretty good.I've never been to the water parks around our house, but I have a feeling we will be spending a lot of time there this summer.
Island's of Adventure, Universal Studios
We knew we were probably crazy for going to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter less then a week after it's long awaited grand opening, but the timing worked out.
We had heard stories of 5 hour waits to get into that section of the park and hours to get on each ride. Fortunately that wasn't the case the day we went. We barely waited at all and even with Shaun losing our tickets (a wonderful stranger found them for us) we entered Hogsmead barely after opening. I'm not allowed to ride anything, but I stood in the cue lines with Carley and Shaun. The line for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey was neat just to stand in. We walked through the Herbology green house, Dumbledore's office, through corridors of moving paintings, and through the Gryffindor common room. I hear the ride was incredible, but I'll have to wait to find out until after Ben is born.We visited Honeydukes and indulged in pumpkin juice, butter beer, and Calderon cakes. The butterbeer was delicious! I would go back just for that.
All of Hogwarts was done really well. The only experience we didn't get to do was Olivander's Wand Shop. I hear that they've done an excellent job in making it feel really when the wand chooses you, so I am definitely going to wait in the line for that next time.
I am so glad that my sister, Carley was able to come with us. She is a lot of fun and Shaun also had someone to ride the rides with. Poor Carley...she wore a pair of flip flops to the park and within the first 20 minutes we were there, her shoes completely broke. She spent the rest of the day barefoot, running from one shady spot to another. But she was a great sport about it and the day turned out wonderful despite Shaun's blunder.Shaun's blunder... well, Harry Potter is currently the most popular attraction at Universal Studios so for crowd control, they only let a designated number of people into that part of the park at a time. There is a long line that runs from Harry Potter, through Jurassic Park, past comic land, and into marvel comic book land. To make sure there aren't people cutting in line, they come by and pass out little red tickets to get into Harry Potter as people exit. I handed our tickets to Shaun. It took us about a half an hour to get from our place in line to the entrance of Hogwarts, and somehow in that 30 minutes Shaun lost our tickets. If we would have gone back to the end of the line, it would have been 3 hours at least. Luckily a wonderful women behind us saw us searching frantically for the lost tickets and found them for us... but we didn't let Shaun forget about it for the rest of the day either :)
Downtown Disney
No visit to Orlando is complete without a trip to Disney World, or at least one of it's attractions. Once again Carley joined us on our trip and played the part of spoiling Aunt. Right off she got both the kids big Disney suckers.
We wondered around the shops, played in the water fountains, rode the train, and had a fun lunch at Rainforest Cafe. Thanks for a fun day, Aunt Carley!
After three days of running around, it was time to do nothing at all, and that's exactly what we did the day after. We sat on our backsides and played video games...which can be pretty fun too.
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