Ramsdell Family Blog

This year Jenna changed dance studios and joined the performing company. She will be competing in some competitions with her lyrical dance group. They had a photo shoot last week. The whole dance company did a production number to Seussical-they all wore crazy costumes!

Last week Jenna became an official teenager!!! She celebrated her birthday by having a party at Auntie Ann's Pretzels in the mall. They gave the group a history of pretzel's and then showed them how to make them. The kids had a lot of fun playing with the pretzel dough. The girls decided to make 1 giant pretzel with all the dough. At the end they each got a pretzel and lemonade.  Then we headed back to our house for cake and presents.

Our Christmas was spent quietly at home with presents and yummy food.  Christmas breakfast tradition-eggs benedict  Christmas facials for the whole family Everyone with all their Christmas loot!

Jenna has talked about wanting to swim with manatees for quite some time. So we drove 2 hours to stay in Homosassa Springs, FL and snorkel with the manatees. On the day we were scheduled to swim with manatee's Florida had a cold front come in. When we left on the boat ride to get to the manatees it was 38 degrees-burrr!! Luckily they provided wetsuits and the water in the Homosassa Springs was 72 degrees. Good thing for us was, when it is cold the manatees migrate to the warm springs so we were able to see lots of them.  It was truly an amazing experience being in the water with the manatees. They wanted to interact with us. They would swim up to us, stare and roll over so we would pet their bellies.   If you ever are in FL we would highly recommend going!  Yep that's a manatee right there, kind of looks like a rock.  The day before we snorkeled we went to the Homosassa Springs Wildlife park. It was fun, they had an underwater viewing tank that was ...

We spent week before Christmas in Florida at Disneyworld.  We had a lot of fun checking out the Haunted Mansion decorations.  We stayed at 3 different Disney Hotels (we like to check them all out). This was the last one we stayed at- Port Orleans Riverside Resort. We had a princess room which Jake was not so thrilled about. The headboard had a button to push that made fireworks on the headboard. I really liked it and hope to stay there again some time.  We also stayed at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. This is my all time favorite hotel. How could it not be? Amazing animals every where. This is a picture from our balcony-there were some animals out there, just can't see them in the photo.  Animal Kingdom lobby all decorated for Christmas.  Epcot The new Beauty and the Beast dinning hall in the new Fantasyland.