Surprise!!

I am super excited!! After all the pain and horribleness of the last month I finally have something that is truly making me happy!

I have a HUGE surprise for my girls! GIANT, ENORMOUS, GINORMOUS even!

We are taking a trip to Disney World in April. My girls know this part already as we have been planning and saving up for it for 2 years. They knew why we didn't always get to go out to eat or why we didn't go see a lot of movies at the movie theater. They are counting down the days.
There was one small thing that my girls REALLY REALLY wanted to do while we were in Florida.
Swim with dolphins.
Unfortunately when I looked up the pricing there was just no way we could budget that. So the girls had accepted it and knew we were going to have a great time spending 4 days going to all the Disney parks.

We had been planning to do this trip with my brother before he died. He was going to drive down from North Carolina and stay at the hotel with us. He had been planning on taking Bri to Universal Studios one of the days we were there. Just the 2 of them. All of us were looking forward to spending a week with him before he was deployed again to the Middle East.
His death had put a damper on my excitement to go. I was starting to dread going and there is still that part of me that thinks I will be an emotional wreck while we are there. I am hoping that the surprise I have for the girls will help me through this.

We received an amount of money from brother's death and we have decided to use a part of it to take the girls to Discovery Cove and swim with the dolphins :)
It will be something they will never forget and hopefully something they can think fondly of Uncle Matt for. I know for me being able to give them this is making me feel lighter, less like Atlas, with the weight of the world on my shoulders.
So Friday during our vacation we will be swimming with dolphins, snorkeling, feeding birds, and hanging out at the secluded beaches. Also included in our tickets are unlimited 14 day passes to SeaWorld which was somewhere else my girls wanted to go but I just couldn't figure out how to squeeze out any more money.

We are keeping it a surprise and not telling them about it. So if you talk to my girls please don't say anything to them and pray for no tropical storms...

I truly cannot wait for this vacation. Even though I know I will be so exhausted from our week that I will need a vacation when we get home ;)