Holiday Insanity

For anyone who actually reads this blog but isn't a Facebook friend, we have just returned from a week's trip to Disney. I shared some highlights of the trip on Facebook, but tried to keep much of it offline until we returned. 

Spending the Christmas/New Year's week in Disney World was...nuts.  Generally good, but nuts all the same.

Today, Charlotte has school but my husband and I are still off work, so today is aftermath day. Unpacking. Doing laundry. Sorting the mess left behind in the house from Christmas. Grocery shopping. Taking the first stab at managing the hundreds (if not thousands) of photos taken on a total of 4 cameras plus 2 smartphones over the trip.

Yes, 6 picture-taking devices for 4 people. (Did I say nuts?) Santa brought each of our kids an age-appropriate camera. Trystan's is a Crayola one with kid-sized handles and big, easy buttons. Charlotte's is a low-end Vivitar 5mp camera. My husband and I already owned two--my fairly simple Olympic one and his fancy-but-older Canon with the extra lenses and too many settings (too many in my opinion...which is why I have a simple one).

This morning, we also took the first peek at the credit card bill. Yowza. It wasn't unexpected, but the number is still cringe-worthy to me. I suppose it could have been worse.  We drove to Orlando (and our Hybrid Highlander gets darned good gas mileage for a heavily loaded SUV driving through mountains), so that shaved some off the potential bottom line. And we used a timeshare instead of staying at Disney. In theory that is cheaper (that's a whole 'nother discussion, though).  We tried to buy groceries and packed snacks so we didn't have to buy everything in the parks, which also helped a lot. And the food in the parks was surprisingly reasonably priced (we spent more at some fast-food joints on the road).

Pictures will likely follow, assuming I can boil the mess of digital files down to a few favorites. And I am going to attempt to journal the trip here for our family's future reference.  So if you start seeing posts dated last year, don't worry. The blog's not broken. :)

For now, back to the laundry.