Disneyland

Today was the day I had been looking forward to for the past several months.  I have been anticipating taking the little kids to Disneyland for a long, long time.  We took Jordan when he was 6 years old and Rylan was a mere 11 weeks old, so it has been a long time!  It took nearly an hour and a half before we even entered the park.  The parking was ridiculous, the lines were ridiculous and the crowds were unbelievable.  The grand spending total for a day at Disney including parking, 6 tickets, two meals, four hats and one toy each was around $1200.  Ouch.  Thank you to grandma Judy for the Christmas money for the tickets, and thank you to the aunties and Aunt Karen and Uncle Steve for the gift money for the toys.  The kids had a blast picking out their stuff!

It was a little difficult negotiating which rides to ride and so forth with such a diverse age group in our family, but with the smart move by getting fast passes, and some trickery to get Owen onto rides, we made it work.  Poor Owen.  He gets easily rattled by watching rides.  It was to our advantage that a lot of the rides were sort of hidden from view, so we could easily fool him into thinking it wasn't so bad.  His imagination gets the best of him.  Here he is on the platform on the Matterhorn after he rode it.  He loved it, of course, but for the entire hour we were waiting in line, we kept telling him that people were screaming because they were afraid of getting wet, not because the ride was scary.  The only scary part of the ride was the Yeti.

We waited an hour to get on It's a Small World, and it was worth it, since it was decorated differently for the holidays.  Here is a group shot of almost everyone on our boat as we head into the ride.  Dean and my brother were in search of the last round of fast passes for the day.

Another round of trickery was involved to get Owen onto Splash Mountain.  He was fooled until the very end, when we went up, up, up before we went down, down, down.  He was seated right in front of me, and as we made the climb up, I could here him say, "I have a bad feeling about this!!".  It was all good in the end.  Here is screen shot of the other boat of family: Drew, Rylan, Jordan, Connor, my brother Kirk and SIL Michelle.  I love Rylan's expression...lol.

We wandered over to Tomorrowland and gave Space Mountain a try.  Go figure, the scariest way to ride a roller coaster - in complete darkness - thrilled Owen to pieces!  He said over and over, "It's like we're in space!!!!"  I'm so glad they all rode it and loved it.  We ended the night with a few more rides and then a parting picture in front of the castle.  The kids lasted all day with minimal meltdowns, which was amazing.  So glad we all had the chance to spend the day together and share in the fun!