December 25: Animal Kingdom

I don’t know why I have a problem documenting longer events, but I do.  I always get about half-way through and then lose steam.  So I’m here to finish up the Disney posts.  (So she says.) On Christmas Day we went to Animal Kingdom.  We had originally planned to do Magic Kingdom on this day, but thought better of it.  And I’m sure glad we did.  I heard that they closed the gates shortly after 10 in the morning because there were so many people.  Can you imagine how miserable that would have been?  Animal Kingdom was not too crowded, and it was a really fun park for everyone in our group.  The safari was my favorite, and Aaron’s was the bird show.    Kiera was picked as the volunteer for the bird show, and she had a little “math” competition with a parrot.  Parrot won every time (except the last, which was a toss-up).  Turns out the parrot was responding to cues, but it was cute anyway.   Sharing an ice cream with Grandpa.   The kids loved seeing the baby giraffe.  It was super cute. This sight inspired everyone to sing “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” for the rest of the trip.  Really.  The singing did not stop for days. My favorite picture from the safari.  After we watched the Festival of the Lion King we ran to go catch another show (which we just barely missed).  On the way, though, we ran past a guy yelling, “No line to meet Tigger!  Come and see him!”  How often does that happen at Disney World?  So we made a quick detour to say hi to Tigger.  And even though it probably caused us to miss the Nemo show, I’m so glad we did it.  It was the highlight of the trip for Averi.  As soon as she saw him she RAN to greet him and barreled into his arms.  It was the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen in my life.  We were the last family to take pictures of him, since he needed to “go and eat some birthday cake,” according to his handler.  Hardly a day passes (nearly a month later!) that Averi doesn’t mention seeing Tigger and Tigger eating his birthday cake.  Way too cute.