It’s cold as balls in Ohio.

And let me tell you, it is fantastic in Florida.

My poor little toes nearly froze off when I descended from the plane last night… in my flip flops.

We had a great trip!! And, I am happy to say, returned alive.

I was a wee bit nervous getting on the plane. I used Jane’s strategy and said hello to the pilots. I was happy to see that they were both sporting wedding rings… I was hoping their marital (and presumably parental) status gave them a little more incentive to land safely. Like when your car insurance goes down when you get married, you know? So anyway, the flight was great and we arrived without a hitch.

As I mentioned, we were traveling with two other sets of parents, one of which travels without their kids a couple times a year (smart people) and has also been at this parenting thing longer than the rest of us. They suggested that we call home and check on the kids, tell the grandparents we arrived, etc, but wait til the next day to actually talk to the kiddos. Again, these are smart people. But did Andy and I listen to them? Um, of course not. I thought it would be a great idea to talk to Kate… even though it was about 7:30 p.m. and she hadn’t had a nap that day. She, of course, started crying and asking me to come pick her up. It was AWESOME. Oh, and then, like five seconds later, I was putting beer bottles in the mini-fridge and one EXPLODED in my face. Seriously, it popped like a balloon. I have no idea why or how it did that, but it scared me to death. I had beer (but not glass, thank God) in my eye. It was horrible!

So after these two fabulously traumatic experiences, we got settled in our room at the Polynesian, and went to dinner at Jiko in the Animal Kingdom Lodge.

The Disney Marathon was actually the reason for our trip – on Saturday, Andy ran the “Donald,” which is a half marathon (13.1 miles), and then on Sunday, three of our friends ran the “Mickey,” the full marathon (26.2 miles)… and two insane people in our group ran the “Goofy,” which is BOTH races! That’s ca-razy, if you ask me, but what an accomplishment. It was so wonderful to see them all accomplish their goals, and it was such fun to cheer them on. The whole atmosphere was so neat… the runners cheering each other on, the spectators cheering for each runner (not just the ones the knew), and the Disney employees (sorry, cast members) who congratulated each of them all weekend long. It was very cool… almost makes me think about training for such a thing. Almost. But not quite.

Anyway, we had a great trip and even though we missed Kate terribly, it was really, really nice to have some adult time with our friends and with each other. I highly recommend a long-weekend trip (or longer!) for all of you parents out there… it takes a lot of effort, coordination and planning to make it happen, but it’s SO worth it.

The only thing that would have made it better was if my Christmas tree had taken itself down while we were gone. Ugh, it’s back to reality!