Disney on Ice

We began our vacation by taking the girls to see Disney on Ice. They loved it! Just tonight, Gabi wanted to give us a show in which she "ice skated" (on our wood floors) about various celebrations ("celebrations" being the theme of Disney on Ice).

Even Katarina enjoyed the show! Actually, she slept through the first part and then woke up to eat, but after that she watched intently. She's such a good baby! Bella wasn't feeling well, so I didn't catch any great pictures, but she liked the show, anyway. All my girls were very well-behaved.

Bella is still talking about the Mad Hatter singing Happy Birthday to "you and you and you!" The girls' favorite part of the show was the princess dance, of course:

Road Trip!
The next day, we started our two-day drive up to Notre Dame for Katarina's baptism. Initially, while we were in the car, Bella kept insisting, "No, I want to go to a trip!" Poor girl knew we had been promising a long road trip to Notre Dame, but she didn't understand what that meant.

I took a few pictures when we stopped for gas.

The girls tried out all the rocking chairs in front of Cracker Barrel.

We broke the 12-hour drive into two days, and we found a hotel (each direction) with a swimming pool for the girls to get a bit of fun exercise between days cooped up in the car. I really liked the Country Inn in Effingham, IL. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take pictures of the kids swimming.

On our last day of vacation, we ate lunch at Lambert's in Sikeston, MO.

On the return trip, the girls loved blowing bubbles whenever we had to stop so I could feed the baby. For obvious reasons, I didn't take any pictures, though. Overall, the trip was easy. The girls watched plenty of Kai-Lan and other videos on our DVD player in the new minivan. This far exceeded their usual TV-time allowance, but at least the lessons were good. Gabi wrote down the words to one of Kai-Lan's songs:

"When you cause a problem, here's what you should do: First you say you're sorry, then you help to fix it, too!"