The Croc Family goes to Epcot to eat our way around the world for Thanksgiving

That's me, mom, Scout and Wolf.

And, other than the fact that my mom BROKE her arm on Wednesday (playing hopscotch - and no she hadn't started drinking yet) and walked around for four days cradling it like a little chicken wing before she finally went to the doctor, the Doubletree might as well have been the Motel 6, we got to hang out in the parking lot outside Epcot for an hour waiting on the bus, everyone else in America decided to join us, it cost more than my recent trip to Costa Rica, and Troy, my grandmother and my uncle came home sick, we had a great time!

Seriously, despite all of the above, it really was fun. We got to see the ICE! show at the Gaylord Palms. It was beautiful and freezing at 9 degrees - 9 degrees is cold! We ate Chinese food for Thanksgiving dinner, drank margaritas in Mexico, talked turtle with Crush, drove the test track and saw Epcot all decorated for Christmas.

At the end of the day, just as we finally found her a restroom, Scout had a little accident. She took off her wet pants in the stall fully intending to walk back out and through the park in her crocs, socks and shirt. No pants. No underwear. Nothing. When I insisted that she put her pants back on, she said no, "it was too embarrassing." Yup, that's my girl, she'd rather walk around half naked than wear wet pants.

Along with ten billion other people, we visited the Magic Kingdom on Friday and among other fun stuff, rode Thunder Mountain. The kids loved it and laughed and screamed the whole time. Scout had her hands up for the entire ride - sitting behind her I could barely see her hands over the back of the coaster. We also got to have breakfast with Pooh, Tigger, Mary Poppins, the Mad Hatter, and Alice in Wonderland at the Grand Floridian and eat dinner at the Hoop Dee Do Revue in Fort Wilderness.

As you can see, we all wore our Crocs. The kids kept finding other people wearing Crocs and saying, hey, they can be part of the Croc family too!

Christmas Photo Outtakes

And there are only two of them.

Just one step away from a minivan

We bought an artificial pre-lit Christmas tree today.

In the spirit of our old, "traipsing around two or three different tree lots searching for the perfect tree, strapping it to the top of the Jeep, real tree" selves, the fake tree is sitting in the middle of the garage right now. You know, so the branches have a chance to settle down. Okay, because Troy is sick and I don't have the energy to do all the moving around and decorating yet.

In our defense, did I mention that it is pre-lit? That's right, pre-lit. Now we will have to replace the 14 year old tradition of fighting over the placement of the lights followed weeks later by the equally strong tradition of fighting over who has to take down the lights with something new and exciting for the 2006-2007 season. Also, we are hosting the Baines family Christmas this year, but because people are flying in from Colorado and California, we are celebrating in January. So, the tree will be up for quite some time and with our track record, any real tree that we picked out would have absolutely no hope of still having more than ten needles on it by the middle of January.

I'm still a little sad.