December 2023

Our financial advisor had a customer appreciation day at the Kentucky Theatre. Snacks were provided and they showed the original Home Alone movie. We all wore our pajamas because we had a PJ party to go to right after this event. 

Brinley has become slightly obsessed with paint by numbers. She will sit at the kitchen table for hours painting. She finished this masterpiece and then decided to give it to one of her teachers at school. 

Landon enjoys going to the basketball games with me, but I believe that he enjoys eating the breadsticks more than anything. He has gotten good at eating while walking too in case we are running late to the game. 

Brinley's last home game and they played her friend Aminah and Crawford Middle School. It was 8th grade night and the Hayes Panthers came out victorious. 

Time for the city championship and Brinley's team won the entire tournament. Both teams that had beaten them during the season were both eliminated by other teams which really opened up the bracket for the Panthers. The girls played great and were happy to take home the 6th Grade City Championship!

It just so happens that the championship game was against our friend Aminah and her Crawford teammates. This was the second time this season that they met in a championship game. Brinley always enjoys seeing her Rampage teammates. 

Yes those are headlights on my crocs. One of my patients saw them and said that they just had to get them for me. They are extremely bright and even have a flashing feature to them. 

A co-worker of mine gave us tickets to the Southern Lights out at the Horse Park. It was a great night to go out and see some Christmas lights, see the animals, have some kettle corn, and take some pictures. I think we might have gone out here every year the kids have been alive. 

Brinley was extremely excited to see this highland cow and she just had to feed it some of her carrots. This little girl loves some animals.

The Dance Blue crew got together after work one night to have our annual ornament exchange. Of course we always have a blast as people are getting their ornaments stolen from one another. 

We got together with our summer baseball family for a Christmas party. The ladies had all kinds of fun games planned for the night. Including stuffing balloons into pantyhose and then putting them on your head. The kids really enjoyed rolling Oreo's across a table to see what mystery substance it fell into which included hot sauce, lemon juice, Nutella, milk, or jelly. 

Our Elf, Nick Kringle is always up to something crazy around the house. One day it even made a drawing on the kid's mirror so that you could be an Elf yourself. So of course I took an Elfie!

Five years ago Taylor gave our family this puzzle and we have turned it into a family tradition. Every year we time ourselves to see how quickly we can put it together. This year was our quickest yet. It also turns out that we are very consistent because this is the third time that this was the exact last piece. I know because we always date and initial which piece we put in last. 

Santa came early at the Heflin house actually on December 23rd. We were all surprised to find plane tickets and season passes to Disney World. In fact our plane left later that night for Orlando. 

About ready to board the plane to Orlando!

When we went to get on the plane one of the pilots asked Landon if he wanted to see the cockpit. He said sure and went up to check it out. They let him take a seat and push some buttons. It was a pretty cool experience. They even let him push the throttle forward. I was actually surprised at how much they let him do. 

We arrived in Orlando and got to our hotel at about 1 am on Christmas Eve. After a short nights sleep we got up and headed to church. I wanted to make sure that we celebrated the real reason for Christmas, which is Jesus birth. My three amigos had some trouble staying awake during the service. It was a nice little church and they had a great little Christmas Eve choir program after the message. 

Our year at Disney started with a trip to the Magic Kingdom. We got a picture with the castle in the background. The place was packed full of people. We took some time walking around and getting accustomed to the park again. 

Our first ride of the year was actually Pirates of the Caribbean. We also got a ride on It's a Small World, which is secretly one of my favorites. I had three people try to pull the sword from the stone, but no success on these attempts. 

We went to Tales with Belle and both Landon and I got picked to participate in the story. Landon was Belle's father stuck in the prison and I was one of the knights. It is a cute little interactive show. I couldn't get the girls to volunteer. Maybe next time. 

I was lucky enough to get in the virtual queue for the new ride Tron. Everyone really enjoyed it, but it really stinks that you can only get in the virtual queue once a day or pay about $20 per person/per ride. Landon was finally tall enough to ride the cars by himself so we all drove around the track in our own car. It won't be too long before both of these two are driving in real life. Scary to think about that!

Christmas morning we got to Animal Kingdom for the opening. We went to the opposite side of the park from Avatar land and there was hardly anyone in the park. We rode Expedition Everest with no wait three times in a row. 

Animal Kingdom's only ride that you never get the same experience on is always fun to ride, the Kilimanjaro Safari. We spotted lots of animals including the hippos, cheetahs, longhorn bulls, giraffes, and zebras. I got a video too of some rhinos play fighting with one another. 

Our last stop of the day was the Avatar land. Since it had been raining most of the morning the line was down to about 75 minutes which turned out to be the shortest it would be all week. We saw at one point the line was 4.5 hours long. The entrance to the ride is so long that it actually had a bathroom built into it halfway through the queue. The kids both really enjoyed the ride. I thought it was just ok for the amount of time that we waited in line. 

On the way out of Animal Kingdom we got the kids their only actual gift that they were going to get on Christmas this year, an interactive Magic Band. We left the park to go get a little rest and have lunch.

For lunch I went out and grabbed my favorite food, deep dish pizza. The place was really understaffed and it took about and hour and a half to get our pizza. We were really happy to dig in once I got it back to the hotel. Thankfully the kids were with Jennifer at the hotel and they spent some time in the pool. 

After a little rest at the hotel we headed back out to Hollywood Studios to see a little bit of Star Wars land and Toy Story Land. With some complications to our newly acquired Magic Bands and getting them set up to our phones the guest relations worker gave us some lightening lane passes. We took advantage of them and went to ride Slinky Dog Dash. Things cleared out during the first show of Fantasmic so we rode as many rides as we could.   

This wasn't taken on Christmas, but proved to be one of Brinley's favorite pictures because it included Stitch, who has slowly became one of her favorite characters.

Brinley's goal at the park was to have a Mickey ice cream everyday. Well, one night while we were picking up some stuff at the store I spotted these ice cream Mickey's which gave us a box of 6 for about the price that one cost in the park. Win for us!

The park was so packed for the holiday season that I told the kids that we were going to experience all the things that are relatively no lines. Many of these are things that I have done before, but had fallen asleep in myself. This time it was Jennifer's turn to take a nap in The President's Hall. I also told Jennifer and the kids that I want to try and experience everything that Disney parks has to offer over the next year. On this trip we knocked out quite a few of them - like Country Bear Jamboree, Tiki Birds, Swiss Family Treehouse, Filament, and Tales with Belle.

After about and hour and a half wait we finally got in to ride Rise of the Resistance. It was really awesome and will definitely have to ride it again. This was a cool picture in the line just to get up to the ride.

We tried to take advantage of as many photo opportunities throughout the parks as we could. We found this little photo op with the Rapunzel floating lanterns. I thought they turned out really cute. 

I love seeing what the photos look like when we get off the rides. It is always fun to see what reaction is on all of our faces. 

I really enjoy magic shots. They tell us to do something silly when they take our picture and then a few hours later some magic happens and something appears in our photos. It is fun to see what shows up. 

More ride photos. I really like the picture of Brinley on the Rockin' Rollercoaster. (3rd column, 2nd row) She had no idea that it shoots out so fast to begin the ride. 

For some reason the photographers wanted us to hug almost every time we got a picture made. We got better at it, but a couple of the first pictures we had someone's head blocked by someone else. 

More rollercoaster photos for us. For the rides that we rode multiple times the kids started trying to make silly photos too. 

Tron is one of the newest rides at Disney and you can only ride it by getting into a virtual queue (or pay $20 per rider) so we only got to ride it twice over the days that we were there. 

A couple rides on some classics, the tea cups and carousel. One night while we were leaving the park they had the castle open so that you could walk through it. That doesn't usually happen because they typically have it blocked off for some show that they are doing at the front of the castle. 

The kids both asked for a snack the first night that we were there. Brinley said to me that she didn't remember anything about the last time we had come to Disney except for the Mickey ice cream. She said if I got her another one that it might spark some of her memories. Landon wanted the popcorn because he said it smelt so good every time we walked past a stand. We got the souvenir bucket so that we could get $2 refills every time we had it with us. 

Some more pictures on our adventures. We all enjoyed trying to spot hidden Mickey's in the rides and walking around. 

Another perk of being down in Florida during this time is because the UK Wildcats football team were playing in their bowl game in Jacksonville. We made the 2 hour drive up to the game. 

It was beautiful weather for the game and thankfully we sat in an area that the sun was shining on. Our seats were awesome too. None of the other golf cart guys could make it down to the game so they gave me some of their tickets. 

The Wildcats messed up and some late turnovers gave the game away to Clemson. Landon was devastated. Who can be sad when you are surround by my wonderful family on a beautiful day and being able to watch some football. 

After the game we headed back down to Disney to spend a little more time in the Magic Kingdom. The park closed at midnight and we shut the place down. We got in lots of rides and even were able to watch the fireworks show.

Our flight left at 6 am the next morning and we decided to just head to the airport instead of going back to a hotel. After we slowly made our way out of the park we stopped and had dinner, or breakfast, at Waffle House. Then we made our way to the airport. The airport was a mad house. TSA didn't open until 3 am and when it did there were already a couple hundred people in line already. Thankfully our flight was only delayed 30 minutes. Landon finally passed out on the flight. We were all tired on the flight and just ready to get home. 

Whenever we got back to Lexington we all came home and took a nap. After we got up we took the kids over to MiMi's house and then Jennifer and I went out on a date night. I had gotten tickets to see Tyler Childer's live at Rupp.  

The concert was awesome, but having this beautiful lady by my side made the night amazing. We haven't been going on many dates over the past year. I hope that in 2024 we get back to making time for one another a priority. 

We got invited over again to celebrate with our summer baseball family. We had a great time, but ended up leaving early because I had to get Jennifer home who worked the next morning and I also had to go get Brinley picked up at her church New Year's eve party.