Nathan got his green belt in Taekwondo this week.
We did the Boneyward 5k again this year on 10/27. We all improved our times by about 3 minutes. Nathan came in 13/26 in his age group for the boys. Paul came in 41/59 for his age group among the men. I came in 64/80 for my age group for the women. We decided to go up to Mt Lemmon after the walk to see the Fall colors. We ate at the Cookie Cabin and took the ski lift ride.
Nathan made honor roll the 1st quarter of 3rd grade. He got a 95 in History/Geography, 98 in Math, 83 in Reading, 93 in Recitation, 96 in English Language, 94 in Science and M (meeting the standard) in Latin, Music, Art and PE. He was upset at the honors assembly on 10/24, though, because he did not make high honors or get any of the special character awards.
We went pumpkin picking at Apple Annie's on 10/20.
For Fall break, we went to Florida. We left 10/5. We started with a glass bottom boat ride in Key Largo. I took 2 dramamine and I felt good until we got out to the reef and I went to the bottom of the boat to look down in the water at the fish. I thought it would be more calm when we got there, but it was actually more choppy and he didn't completely stop the boat. I felt sick so I had to go back up to the top. I missed the whole point of the trip! After that, we went to the Theatre of the the Sea, also in the Florida Keys. We got to see animals like dolphins, sea turtles, parrots, etc... Paul and Nathan got to paint with a sea lion. I wish I could have done that, too! We stayed in Key West that night. We didn't really do anything there. We just took a picture by the southernmost point. The next day I went to the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens in Coral Gables while the boys went over to check out the campus at University of Miami. Nathan has decided he wants to go there and study mechanical engineering. We stayed in Naples that night, but we didn't do much in Naples. The next day we spent most of the day on Sanibel Island, collecting seashells on the beach. The next day we went to Dade City's Wild Things where we did a bunch of animal encounters. That was pretty cool because we got to touch, hold and/or feed many animals including a tiger, lemur, sloth, anteater, fennec fox, etc... The next day was Disney. We started at Animal Kingdom. We did the safari ride and went over to their Dinosaur area. I would have liked to have more time in that park. Then we went to Epcot. We all liked Epcot. We bought Nathan a little passport there where he could go to each country and get them to sign it and stamp it. He got most of them, but was missing 2-3. It rained off and on there so we had to wait it out in some of the shops. We would have liked to have more time there, too. We ended our day at Magic Kingdom. There were a lot of people at the first two parks, but I didn't think those were too bad. Magic Kingdom, however, was very crowded. It was too crowded for me. I heard that many schools were off that day due to the hurricane and so families decided to go to Disney instead. We were going to go on Space Mountain, but then realized it was a high speed roller coaster so opted out. Paul and Nathan did the Tomorrowland Speedway ride. After that, we couldn't really figure out what to do. I wanted to stay and watch the fireworks, but Paul had no interest. We stopped in a few shops and left. I couldn't even find a dole whip to try! The next day we did Kennedy Space Center. That was pretty cool. We did a group lunch with astronaut Barbara Morgan. I thought the food was excellent. We did the bus tour there to see the launch site and all that. We also did the walking tour of the rocket garden. The next day we did a pontoon ride by Cocoa Beach near port canaveral. I enjoyed that. We went slow and we were on a "river" instead of the open ocean. Nathan got to drive a little. We saw birds, dolphins and manatees on the trip. I really wanted to see a manatee. I saw them, but I don't know if you will even be able to tell what they are in the pictures. We really only saw their backs come out of the water. That was it. Saturday was awful. Got up at 4 to go to the airport. We got on our plane and sat there for like 45 minutes while they did maintenance checks. We were flying to Phoenix and we just missed our connecting flight to Tucson. They had another flight like 4 hours later, but we had to do standby for it. They gave us $12 each for lunch vouchers to eat at the airport so we ate lunch. Then we waited around forever for the next flight. It wasn't looking good because they said they could probably only get 2 of us on the flight and asked us what we wanted to do. There was another flight about an hour later after that one, but we would be standby on that one, too, with no guarantees. We decided Nathan and I would try to get on this flight and Paul would try to get on the next one. Well, it ended up we were all able to get on the first flight, just not sit together. It was a short flight, though. There were actually several empty seats still because people missed their flight (like we did with our original flight). It was raining all day in Phoenix so there were a lot of flight issues. So we got home around 6 Saturday night.
Me and my photography were featured on VoyagePhoenix.com on 9/18/18! Dennis Swena suggested me to the magazine after they featured him on their website. http://voyagephoenix.com/interview/meet-dawn-hagler/?fbclid=IwAR2XaFsnxtqL9YXFcj3vMhbnoPnGNojQcWAAqjm-uh43S4IcTj3itR4LkVw.
On 8/31, Nathan and Paul drove Cari's U-Haul truck down to her new home in San Antonio. They took a train back to Tucson.
