Disneyland Day 3

(vacation day 4)

It was our final day at Disneyland and we were excited to have some fun.  We headed straight for the Princesses, and I'm so glad we did because the park was so crowded that day.  We got there right as it opened (maybe like 15 minutes after) and still had about a 45 minute wait to see the princesses.  This place is adorable!  It's definitely every little girl's dream.  There are always 3 princess in there all the time, but you have no idea who they will be until you go inside.  We brought Kate's Belle dress from home and just put it on top of her other dress.  Belle is Kate's absolute favorite so I really hoped that she would be in there, but I didn't say anything to Kate because I didn't want to disappoint her.

After waiting in line forever, it was finally our turn to go inside.  We turned the corner and the first princess we saw was Belle!  I almost cried I was so excited! 

You may have noticed before but Kate gets really shy around the characters.  She'll go straight up to them and talk to them but she's so quiet and timid.  She would not smile for any of the pictures!

The other princess that were in there were Ariel and Tiana.  Kate didn't recognize Ariel at first because she wasn't dressed up as a mermaid, or wearing anything that she wears in the movie.  Tiana was the most in character of the princesses.  She talked in a southern accent, and said "ya'll better go get some beignets now ya hear?"  And we sure did later that day at my favorite Disney restaurant, Cafe Orleans.

Mmmm...Cafe Orleans.  Dustin and I ate here every day when we came to Disney 3 years ago.  We're too cheap to order any of the actual entrees so we order two cups of gumbo, these amazing seasoned fries, and mickey mouse shaped beignets for dessert.  SO GOOD!  I may have to cheat on my diet and try to re-create this meal next week because just thinking about it has me drooling.

We also went to Toontown.  This could have been the only thing we ever did in Disneyland and Kate would have been happy.  She was loving all the little houses and things to play with.  We also saw Minnie Mouse.  We waited in line forever to see Minnie because Sherice and I really wanted a picture of our girls in their dresses with Minnie Mouse.  Well, when it was finally our turn (Minnie had to go
"check on her cookies" twice) Emma just screamed!  haha.  Oh well.  What can you do?

Max also had a matching outfit but he blew out of it before I could get any more pictures of him in it!  Little stinker.  Oh- side note.  I LOVE the baby care centers that they have both at Disneyland and California Adventure.  It's such a nice quiet place to go nurse, change, and take care of your babies.  The workers in their are dressed as nannies (adorable) and are so sweet.  They even have little potties in the back for toddlers!  Kate thought that was pretty cool.

The only picture we got of him in his Mickey ears :(  This will probably be his Halloween costume too because we just did not get enough use out of it!  And yes, he is sucking his thumb in this picture!

While trying to take a shortcut through Adventureland to meet up with the family we saw Princess Jasmine!  Of course we had to stop so our shortcut ended up not being a shortcut at all.  The line was short to see her, thank goodness, and Kate was more excited to see her than any of the other princesses.  I think it was because she could actually see why and who we were standing in line for.  Plus, she's been obsessed with the movie Aladdin lately.  Have you figured out by now that Kate is a huge Disney fan?

This day is all jumbled up in my head.  I know that at some point we went on the new Star Tours which is worth mentioning because it was really cool.  Then we headed over to California Adventure again for awhile.

We rode our favorites again and ate dinner there.  Disneyland was open late that night so we headed back over there when it got dark to play there for a couple hours.  We rode Thunder Mountain in the dark (so much more fun) and then watched Fantasmic!  Kate's still talking about the dragon that breathes fire at the end.  After that it was really late and everybody was done. 

We had had a very full and fun time at Disneyland.  I love Disneyland so much, I already want to start planning our next vacation!

Vacation day 3

We had checked the forecast earlier and it was supposed to rain ALL day.  So we decided to take this day off from Disneyland.  If we didn't have so many kids with us, Disneyland would have been awesome that day.  No lines, you could ride Splash Mountain as many times as you want...but with kids it would have been miserable.  It was nice to have a relaxing day in between too!  I think it helped a lot with the kids to have a restful day.  I think I'll plan future vacations like this too.

Anyway, so we got to sleep in a little that morning (haha, yeah right).  I wanted some breakfast and as I was searching for the room service menu, I found the flyer that advertised the character breakfast in the hotel.  Adults: 25.99  Kids (0-2) FREE!  Dustin never eats breakfast anyway, so I just took Kate down to the character breakfast.  I figured about $30 wasn't bad for both of us to eat.  I'm so glad I did!  This was one of the funnest things we did this trip.  They really make it worth the money to go.  Each and every character makes sure to stop at your table to hug the kids and make sure the parents get pictures.  Then about every 15 minutes they would have a big dance party with the characters.  The food was delicious, and of course disney themed.  We had Mickey Mouse shaped waffles and pancakes.  Kate was loving every minute!

 We sat right next to this little stage.  I couldn't get Kate to eat much breakfast because she was having so much fun dancing on it!

  And yes, she does have only one shoe on.

Kate was so excited that she got to "dance with daisy!" that that's all she talked about all day.

All in all, it was definitely worth the money and something I would do again.

We relaxed and napped in our hotel room for a little while and then we met up with the family in Long Beach to go to the

Aquarium of the Pacific

This was a fun little aquarium and the kids just loved it.  When the kids first saw the fish they all started freaking out and laughing!  They were way more excited to see fish than to go to Disneyland.  haha.  Dustin has video on his phone, I'll have to post that later.

The coolest part of this aquarium were these shark embryos.  Yup, these are unborn baby sharks still in their eggs.  There is just a piece of plastic where the rest of the egg should be so you can see inside.  You can actually see the baby sharks swimming around in their eggs!  It was really fascinating, I couldn't stop staring at them!

Those of you that know Kate well know that while she is girly, she is also fearless.  Dustin was helping her touch the stingrays when the worker asked if Kate wanted to touch a shark.  Kate said yes and the lady pulled one out of the tank for her to touch.  Kate touched it and then...

SMACK!  The shark decided it had had enough touching and wiggled itself out of the lady's hands smacking Kate's face with it's tail on the way down.  If you look closely at this picture you can see the shark plunging into the water and Kate's face in shock that it just hit her.  She didn't cry, even though it left a pretty big welt.  She just laughed and said "a shark hit my face".

 

When we were done having fun here we grabbed some McDonalds and went back to our hotel. We all went to bed pretty early. We wanted to be rested for our final day of Disneyland.

Disney Day 2

We woke up early this day hoping to take advantage of our early admission tickets.  Even with rushing, we still only got to the park about 8 minutes before it opened to the general public.  Oh well.  It did get us in line for Peter Pan though, so that was the first ride we rode that day. 

We also took Kate on the carousel,  Mr Toads Wild Ride, and Dumbo.  That's when it started to drizzle a little bit.  We found a place to take cover for awhile then when the rain stopped I decided to take Kate to Pixie Hollow again. 

Let me tell you something about the line for Pixie Hollow.  It looks short, but you are there FOREVER.  They let every little girl go in by themselves and talk to the fairies, and that's the way it should be, but it makes the line move so slow.  Dustin was able to take Max on the Buzz Lightyear Blasters before we had even moved 5 feet.  Then when we were finally about halfway through the line, it started POURING on us!

I asked Kate if she wanted to go find Daddy, but she was very stubborn about going to "pixin howow".  And frankly, I didn't want to lose our place in line either.  So, we got soaked!  Dustin saw us standing there in the pouring rain and ran to get ponchos.  But the line for the ponchos was so long we actually got out of Pixie Hollow before he returned with them!  So Disney day 2 definitely started out as an adventure, but it was fun.  I mean, how often do you get to play in the rain at Disneyland?

We decided then to find an indoor activity, so we headed over to California Adventure to go to the Disney Junior show.  This was just the cutest thing ever and the kids just loved it.  Kate fell asleep on the way, but we woke her up when it was time for the show.  Did I mention how hard it is to have two kids asleep in this stroller?

After the show we rode the Monsters Inc ride (another one of Kate's faves) and then went to the Animation studio to catch a showing of Turtle Talk with Crush.  Have you ever seen that? I still can't figure out how they do this so well.  Anyway about 5 minutes into the show Kate decided that she wanted to spin around (it's dark in there) and she smacked her face on one of the arms of the chair, started crying, so Dustin had to take her out.  Then about 2 minutes after that, Max started crying and I had to take him out, so we didn't get to see much of that show.

The rest of the day was also spent in California Adventure.  We rode the Toy Story ride again, and the Little Mermaid ride again.  I think this was the ride we ended up riding the most.  The girls just could not get enough of it!

Where's Max you ask?

 Oh yes there he is.  He was SO good on this whole trip.  He basically slept the entire time.  That's why the ratio of pictures of Kate to pictures of Max is about 50 to 1.

We also played in Bugs Land where Kate was only a 1/2 inch too short to do the bumper cars.

Then we tried to take pictures of all the kids in their matching Halloween outfits.

These were the best we got.  Have you ever tried to get 5 kids 4 and under to stand still, look at the camera and smile?  Yeah...it's impossible.  These are pretty cute anyway.

When dinnertime rolled around we were all pretty exhausted so we decided to go back to our hotel and eat.  We ate at our hotel restaurant the PCH Grille.  I was surprised to find that it was actually decently priced.  The character breakfast in the morning, however, was not.   There will be more on that tomorrow!  Congratulations if you made it to the bottom of this post :)

Disney Day 1

I slept pretty good that night considering how excited I was. I did wake up multiple times to check and see what time it was, and when I checked the clock at 6:00 I looked over at Dustin only to see that he was wide awake too! So we hopped out of bed and started to get ready. It was a good thing too, it takes a long time to get everybody ready.

We all got dressed in our Mickey shirts, loaded up the stroller and started on the walk to Disneyland. We enter the gates and I took out my camera to get a picture in front of the Mickey flowers. It was then I realized that I left my camera battery charging in the hotel! I'm not going to lie, I died a little inside. I may have cried as well. Even though our hotel is close to the park, it's still about a 15 minute walk so I didn't have time to go grab it before the rest of the family got there. So all the pictures in this post are taken by the PhotoPass people, taken with Dustin's iphone, grabbed off Lacie's facebook page, or taken by Bethany.

After a while we got impatient waiting for everyone else so we entered the park. Kate was loving it, but it wasn't Disneyland until she saw the castle!

The first thing we did was tour Sleeping Beauty's castle.  It's really neat in there.  They have animated pictures depicting the story of Sleeping Beauty all throughout the castle.  After that we decided to ride a ride and the first thing we went on was Snow White.  I had forgotten that that one is actually quite scary!  So Kate's first impression of Disneyland was not the best.  She got over it fast though.

Kate loved riding the rides, a few of her favorites were the "boats" (Jungle Cruise)...

"Umbo"...

...the teacups and the mermaid ride. But her favorite place of all was "Pixin Howow"! Kate loves Tinkerbell and all the fairies.  We watch the Tinkerbell movies so much at our house that even I have an extensive knowledge of each and every fairy.

About halfway through the day all the kids (except Jaylee) crashed.  I love my stroller but it is not built for two kids to sleep in!  We came up with a few different riggs to allow her to sleep, this is just one.

That night Disneyland closed early for trick or treating so we headed on over to California Adventure.  We rode Toy Story Mania and the new Little Mermaid ride (so cute!) and then got in our spots for World of Color.

A truly amazing show.  I highly recommend it!  After that concluded we went back to our hotel to sleep and be energized for the next day!!

Paradise Pier Hotel

We just returned from our amazing Disneyland vacation yesterday. Be sure to stay tuned for many many posts about fairies, princesses, mermaids, pirates, the beach, and even sharks. We had such a blast and last week just FLEW by. So here is the first post in the Disneyland saga.

For this trip we decided to do something both of us had never done before and that was to stay in one of the Disneyland hotels. We counted it as our birthday presents and we do not regret it! It was so nice to be so close to the park, I think it might have spoiled us a little because I don't think I'll want to do it any other way. We stayed in the Paradise Pier Hotel which overlooks California Adventure.

(Not the view from our room, but from the windows down the hall)

The room was really cute and Kate just loved it.  She said, and this is a direct quote,

"Oh my gosh, I can't believe it!  A mickey mouse room!  And it's all mine!"  She even twirled for emphasis when she said "mine!"  That girl just cracks me up.

Our room was very Mickey, from the lamps down to the shampoo bottles. The hotel also had a very cool rooftop pool (which we never swam in), and a restaurant on the ground floor that had character breakfasts (which we DID do, there will be a post about that later).

On that first day, after relaxing in our room for a bit, we got the kids in the stroller and headed on over to Downtown Disney.  We ate at a yummy mexican food place and did a little window shopping.  Then we headed back to our hotel to attempt to get a good nights sleep, but we were all a little too excited...