Friday is Independence Day

Big Game Photo Safari

For Christmas Elias had received a Fisher-Price Digital Camera. He's played with it over the past 6 months, snapping pictures around the house, but we've never taken the camera with us anywhere. Today, we finaly fixed that and took the Kid Tough Camera (and the kids) to the Catoctin Wildlife Preserve and Zoo. Tanner loved all the animals and Elias had a kick taking pictures of them all. Well, not all of them...he wouldn't take pictures of animals he didn't like! Anywho, take a look at Elias' photography over at my Flickr page.

Comedy Central Presents

At the end of every school year Joey's school has a talent show. For the past five years Joey has performed stand-up comedy at these talent shows. It takes a lot of confidence and courage to pull something like this off, and Joey has nailed it every year. This year the school finally made available a video of the show for the students to keep. Here's Joey's performance of all his own original material.

Two Kids in Print

Joey just finished his sophomore year of high school! He brought home the school's literary magazine and showed us that he had two photographs published in it. Joey had taken a photography class and one of his assignments was to experiment with light. Joey snapped a few pictures of Elias with different light sources. One of those pictures made the magazine. So we've got two kids featured in this year's publication. The picture of Elias was used as a background for a poem someone else wrote:

Jedi Elias

First of all, you have to cut me some slack. This is the longest amount of time this blog has gone un-updated since I started it 2 1/2 years ago! During the down time, we spent a week at my favorite spot in the whole world, Walt Disney World! I want to tell you about a very magical moment that we experienced on our trip. As you may have read before, my children are obsessed with Star Wars, so visiting the Star Wars based attractions while at Walt Disney World was high on our list of things to do. A new attraction that they've added since we were there last is the Jedi Training Academy where kids get to train in the art of using a lightsaber with a "real" Jedi master. As soon as we arrived at Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park we headed straight to this new show and waited for the next performance. As the show started, much to our delight Elias was picked to be one of the handful of kids that got to go up on stage and train with the Jedi knight! Very exciting, indeed!

First they handed all the kids a Jedi robe and a lightsaber to train with...



Not usually the most attentive child, Elias did really well and paid attention to this teacher and got down all the moves he was taught very quickly...

After going through a series of lightsaber moves a half-dozen times some familiar music began to play as two Storm Troopers took to the stage with blasters in hand. They had all the kids move to one side of the stage...at which point I think half of them wet their pants. Then, as smoke filled the stage, the Dark Overlord of Evil - Darth Vader, himself, made his entrance. Vader tried to lure the kids to "the dark side" but their Jedi Master was confident that the force was strong within them and that they could resist the temptations of the dark side of the force. One-by-one the kids got to take turns showing Darth Vader what they've learned to do with a lightsaber. Some of the kids just kind went through the motions, but Elias was ready to fight. When it was his turn, he remember all the moves and really let Darth Vader have it! (It was awesome!)

After the young Jedi defeated Darth Vader, there was a graduation ceremony from the Academy, and all the kids got a diploma to take home. Of course they had to give back the light saber and robe...but we bought Elias an official Jedi Robe in the Star Wars gift shop 100 feet away.

Even though I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, it was really cool to get to see Elias live out a fantasy like that! In my 23 visits to Walt Disney World, it was really one of the most magical, memorable moments I've ever experienced!