First Day of Karlee’s Wish Trip

It has been a long time since I blogged which is a great thing because it means our life is getting back to normal! Except a lot of activities and fun stuff Karlee has had nothing of major interest happen.  She still goes for monthly check-ups at the hospital, but so far everything is great.  We found her an incredible pediatrician in Okotoks who we went and saw once and Karlee loved her!

Now onto the real reason for a new blog!  Today we left Calgary for Karlee’s Wish Trip with the Children’s Wish Foundation. As a little background information, any child diagnosed with a life threatening illness can be granted a wish.  We were shocked by this as we thought only terminal patients got wish trips. I must say the social worker must have been shocked when she told us. We were a few months into treatment and everything was going really good.  We were in the hospital for something or other and she had us alone in a hospital room and we were just chatting when she dropped that one. Both of us looked at each other and thought, “Shouldn’t the doctor be telling us if something is going that wrong?” Once she explained how it worked and told us how we could use it as a tool to get through the tough spots we were on board.

So back to the wish.  Karlee’s wish was to meet the princesses and to swim with the dolphins.  We were informed that those were 2 wishes and we could go to Hawaii and swim with the dolphins or got to Florida and meet a princess. Well we couldn’t disappoint a little girl so we took the Florida option and decided we would just do the dolphins while we were down there and pay for that ourselves.

This morning we were up bright and early and Uncle Randy picked us up and drove us to the airport.  We had a direct flight with Westjet and the flight attendants were incredible.  They kept making sure we were good and bringing Karlee free snacks.  A 5 hours flight is never the most fun thing, but both kids did excellent.

When we got to Orlando we took the tram to the main terminal where we were met by David.  He was excellent and led us through the airport, helped us get our luggage, get the rental car and gave us directions and advice.  It was very strange being met by someone holding up a sign with Karlee’s name on it.

After a relatively quick drive and a couple of tolls we arrived at the Give Kids the World village.  They treated the kids so good.  After an introduction meeting they showed us to our Villa. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms with a little kitchen.  The kids get the bigger room and a much bigger bathroom.

We went to the gingerbread house for supper and then the kids and Jennifer headed over to the pool while I went to the orientation.  When I finally got out of there I walked over to the pool and they were having a blast.  After a quick trip to Walmart for some munchies and to check out the souvenirs we were back to the Village for a quick walk and pizza snack and then they were off to bed.





Tomorrow we are going to start our adventures with the parks!