Convention: Day 1

After our fun at Cocoa we went to Orlando to take part in the International Convention for Families of SMA (FSMA). The Da Costa's, Eric, and the Eichelberger women came with us to a really awesome restaurant called T-Rex. This restaurant has robotic dinosaurs throughout the entire place. Every 20 minutes there is a meteor shower that affects each room differently. There is a deep sea room, a fire room, an ice-age room, and we sat in the forest. Evan was in love, Landon and Christian were terrified at the beginning and apprehensive by the end.

this child was in awe the entire time!

Christian during a meteor shower ... tooo funny!!!

Landon just held on as tight as he could to Justin's neck.

Our waiter introduced us to this dino, which promptly became Evan's best friend.

I love Disney!

by the end of the week our little guys became friends.

this scene from Sleeping Beauty is entirely made out of lego!

Families of SMA

The SMA community is a relatively small one. 1 in every 6,000 babies are born with SMA. When we heard that the international convention was in Florida we jumped at the opportunity to go. We got into our room and headed down to the main reception. It was already so fun just being in a space where there are so many families in our situation. There were so many people in wheelchairs. We felt right at home. When we ran into our fellow Canadian friends we were having such a great time, and then ...............

Evan's chair stopped working.

I started to cry. I started to freak out just a little. Here we are at a convention for Evan and his chair is broken!

Thank heavens Susi and Bruce was there. I really do think that God was really aware of my placement when the chair broke again. I would have turned pretty hysterical, pretty quickly. What happened instead was that Susi and Bruce talked me through it, told me that the vendors would be there in the morning and they would be more than happy to fix it. So we put Evan's chair into manual mode and I took over the job of pushing his 300lb. chair around the opening circus activities.

We did have a good time, and thankfully the magic of the evening overpowered my anger towards continental.

The best part of the evening was when the boys got to meet the characters. Evan was over the moon excited and Landon was not really a fan. Each character signed an autograph book for our boys and we took a picture with each one. It was a magical night!

And the best of all ........

Mickey Mouse!!!!

check out Evan's face! He was so excited that Mickey wanted to hold his hand. Evan Landon managed to give Micky an apprehensive, and very reluctant, high five.