Disneyland Day 2

Day 2 at Disneyland began bright and early. Particularly early considering how seriously we Disneyed ourselves out the day before. The gates opened at 8, so we got to the turn styles at about 7:20 am. ' Cause that's how we roll. Okay, well, Matt doesn't really roll that way, but I am totally a morning person, so that's how we roll. More importantly than my temperament, however, is the sheer brilliance of arriving early. Lots of people do it, but WAY MORE people wait to arrive at theme parks until the beastly middle part of the day. By the time 11 am rolls around, we have done half of the park without lines and when everyone else and their dog is in line for the rides, we stop for a lunch break and some "fluff" activities. We did have a little bump the road when we waited at the turn styles, but a little kindness from strangers kept us on track and we were right near the front ready to begin at 8 am sharp! If you ask me, Early arrival is the only way to go. Here we are waiting for them to drop the ropes and Let Us IN!!! Our kids were so very excited to get in... this nice dude with the Mickey glove was motioning and miming to them to keep them entertained while we waited for a few minutes.

Our first stop for Day 2 was the Matterhorn Bobsled... which is one of my personal favorites. I love this ride, but the lines are atrocious throughout the day... unless you get there early! Matt ran by to get a fast pass and we hopped on all together after a 3 minute wait... not too shabby!

After the Bobsleds, we walked right on to It's a A Small World, which none of us had ever ridden before. (It's lines are pretty terrible for most of the day as well) This is a fun one for young children and it's just classic Disney!

Tori LOVED looking at all the singing children!!

Next Stop: Princesses! In order to avoid the atrocious tightly wound chain link line nightmare to meet these lovely ladies, we arrived about 15 minutes early. Matt ran over with the kids to ride the Tea Cups and a few other things with short lines while I waited for the Princesses. Unfortunately, it was at this point that I realized my phone was missing!! Yeah... so if you read my post about my keys, you might be noticing a pattern with my behavior here. And it's not a pretty one. I DO try... I'm just a busy, crazy Mom with too many schedules and thoughts in my head at any given time.

Anyway, it turns out that they fell out of my shorts on the Matterhorn and Matt retrieved them for me after a lot of running and investigative work. Sigh. See what I mean? He's my hero. So, after he found my phone and ran it back to me in line for the princesses, he ran off with Isaac to ride Pirates of the Caribbean and I took the girls in to meet:

I do NOT have any idea why the text is enlarged here. When I am composing, it shows that it is normal sized, but when I publish, it is big. Grrrr...

Ariel! (That's Tori showing her a leaf!)

Okay, y'all. So... I guess these girls are supposed to "play the part" so to speak. Which isn't saying too much for any of the characters as there isn't a whole lot of diversity. But, Tiana was speaking, or attempting to speak in a Southern/Cajun accent. Sorta like in the movie. And while I admire their attempt at authenticity... this girl's version of that was a little more like Ghetto Cajun.

She actually said to Daphne, " Well, hand me your book, girl! I'll sign my name right up in here!"

I think you get the gist even without hearing my re-enactment.

Let me just say this: If you had been one of those little fake birdies on the wall, You might have heard me stifle a laugh with a snort because I found this to be so amusing. My poor girls were a little baffled at my disgraceful snickering.

These are the moments where I wish I could muster up a poker face. But alas, if I feel it, you pretty much see it! That's just me.

You never know who you are going to meet at this attraction, and last time we went to Disney, Daphne met Aurora, Cinderella and Snow White.

It was super cool for her to get to meet three different princesses this time! Like Belle:

We felt especially blessed and lucky to get to meet 3 different princesses this time! After that stop, we rode the carousel while waiting for the boys to finish up in Adventureland!

After a few trips on the Buzz Lightyear ride, we searched for the perfect souvenirs:

We have a Disneyland policy that states that at the end of the trip, each child gets to choose one reasonably priced souvenir, and we purchase it for them. We discuss this rule before we begin our Theme Park adventures, and it helps a ton.
This method works for us because it helps us to:

1. avoid the "end of ride capitalistic in-your- face souvenir parade" without a temper tantrum

2. Teach our children to consider their purchases and weigh their options rather than engage in impulse buying. When they see something they want, we say, "Okay, think about that. Remember where it is and if you decide that is your favorite thing that you've seen, we'll come back and get it!"

3. Look at price tags. We had a price limit of $25. We always tell them that we could buy something more expensive, but we choose not to spend that much money on toys. And you know what? They get it. Sure, they whine and fuss like any kid who can't have everything they want, but it's reasonable and they think about price and money and the value of a dollar. Good Kids.
At this point in the day, the boys headed over for Jedi training, while we girls went to Princess Story time. Basically, you sit on the floor while one of the Disney Princesses tells an interactive story. So... we hung out and watched Cinderella tell us all about how she became a Princess.

Unfortunately, I had the camera, so we don't have any pictures of Jedi training. We do have an awesome video of Isaac completely demolishing Darth Maul in a light saber battle, but it's too big of a file to upload to Blogger. Isaac was awesome, though!

It's actually pretty cool that he got chosen to be a participant in the Jedi training again. Only a handful of kids get to go up and learn to fight, but Matt got there early and saved a spot on the front row. And when they started to choose the participants, Matt stood up, put Isaac on his shoulders and jumped up and down while they both waved their hands. How could you not choose people that loud and big and obnoxious?!! I love that he did that!

After another spin on Big Thunder Mountain, Matt took the girls back to the hotel for a much needed nap. His legs and feet were paying a surcharge for all of our success at the park the day before. Isaac and I hung out, sans camera, collecting more fast passes and riding super fast and exciting stuff that wouldn't be much fun with the youngens. We had a blast, and I have to say how much I enjoyed being one on one with my son. That doesn't happen too often anymore, and I enjoyed chatting with him. He's a great kid.

Later that afternoon, Matt took the younger kids to see the Bug's Life Show while I took Tori to the Splash Pad.

She watched tentatively for a while. I kept telling her she could run through the sprinklers if she wanted, but she just watched for a few minutes.

And then, she got bold and headed over. Her plan was a little flawed, however. She kept standing on one sprinkler. I said over and over again, "It's going to spray you! Do you want to move? Do you want it to spray you? It's going to spray you if you stay right there." I figured she wanted to wait for it to spray her...

I was wrong.

She was not at all pleased at this turn of events. Thankfully, I had an extra set of clothes in the stroller.

When the kids were done, we got to meet Donald Duck!

During nap time, I picked up some fast passes to the Tower of Terror. From our previous Disneyland experience, I was pretty certain that Daphne would not want to ride that one and I was right. So we girls hung out near A Bug's Land while the boys got their terror on.

Daphne took this picture! Pretty good, huh? My eye is sad, but what's new?

After some dinner and California Screamin' fun, we marched back over for one last hurrah in Disneyland... Isaac and i had been desperate for some Ice Cream, and we tried lots of different places, but the lines were outrageously long. So that evening, we finally stopped and got some of the delicious Pineapple ice cream I had been eyeing every time we passed by or through Adventureland. I'll be honest... this experience was slightly anti-climactic because at this point in the day, things had cooled off considerably and we were kind of shivering while eating it. But it was still TASTY!!

So after a few more spins on the family favorite ride, Big Thunder Mountain, we felt sufficiently Disneyed and took our very last picture in the Magic Kingdom:

Okay, our very last two pictures.... which brings me to my very last Favorite thing about this trip to Disneyland:

Pictures!!

If you read about our trip to Disney a few years ago, you know that pictures were, well.... ummmm... how do you say? I deleted them. It was the saddest thing ever. You can read about it here. But prepare to be sad.

So, I think that was my number one favorite thing about this trip. Not only were we blessed enough to go back as a family, but that I have documentation of the whole thing!

We drug our weak and tired legs back to the hotel and slept and slept and slept some more. Happy Disney, everyone!

Disneyland 2011- Day 1 !

Matt finished up his work in San Jose on Thursday morning... so we decided to drive down to Anaheim and make the most of our time in California! We hadn't originally planned to do Disneyland, so this was a last minute decision and we were a little unsure of how things would go without too much time to make a plan. We drove down Thursday afternoon and pulled into the Camelot Inn and Suites. The absolute best thing about our hotel is that it was directly across the street from Disneyland. We had a five minute walk from our room to the turnstyles at the Opening Gates, which was a HUGE plus! Last time we visited Disney, one of our biggest frustrations was the shuttle to and from the park. So... Big plus!! Also, the very first night, we were able to watch the Fireworks Show from the privacy of our own hotel room. The kids LOVED it! After a good night's sleep, we got up bright and early and hit Disneyland about 45 minutes before they opened. This pic is actually from our last night there!!

Here we are waiting for them to open the park:

We were so excited when they finally let us go in!!!

Awesome Things About our Disney Trip:

(in no particular order!)

1. We used Ridemax!

I could probably do an infomercial for these people- I LOVE it!

We tried Ridemax on our last trip, but we ended up with an even better option, and we were a little hesitant to follow the agenda because it was so very regimented... it seemed a little too strict for vacation. But, this time, we only had 2 day Park Hopper tickets and really wanted to get the most out of our time there, so we thought we would give Ridemax another try. We were so very happy with the results- I would recommend it over and over again!

Speed walking to our first ride, PeterPan's Flight!
2. Watching Victoria ride Dumbo! She was smiling so big- I never want to forget her face!!!

3. We got ahead of schedule !!! Yep- you read that right! I was so stoked- Matt had to remind me that I could slow down because we were doing so well on time!

Since we had a little extra time, we stopped by the Tea Cups before heading over to the Buzz Lightyear ride.

The tea cups are my favorite Fantasyland ride!

Next stop: Buzz Lightyear!

This ride involves shooting laser guns at targets, which is definitely not one of my talents. It's basically an interactive video game. So, as you may have predicted, Matt and Isaac scored like 8 trillion and Daphne and my scored like 8. But it was super fun and we rode it two times in a row!

4. We saw LOTS more characters than we did during our last visit!

Here we are walking into Mickey's House. Daphne and Tori were perplexed to find that the carrots in Mickey's garden would pop up and down by themselves!

Once again, we were ahead of schedule, so we stopped by Gadget's Go-Coaster, which was the first "roller- coaster" we rode.

Daphne was a little nervous at first, but she LOVED it!

Here we are exploring Donald Duck's house boat:

Lunch Break! Which brings me to number Five on my list of favorite things:

5. Packing our Own Lunch in the Park! That may seem like a weird thing to love about your visit to Disneyland, but I HATE paying big bucks for lame-o theme park food. This is a super easy way to save a big wad of cash and if you have a stroller with you, it's a no brainer! SO Easy! We stopped and got some Cotton Candy for a treat after!

6. Milking the Fast Pass System!! By this point in the day, we had ridden everything on our schedule, and we had already picked up Fast Passes for 4 other rides! So, we rode everything without a fast pass before lunch, and now that everyone and their dog was at the park, we could jump on four other rides without waiting in lines! Matt had a much larger stack of Fast Passes later on in the day... we were livin' large!

Here we are before Big Thunder Mountain, which was a family Favorite!

7. Our HUGE kids!!! We planned this trip to Disney partially because while we were already in Cali, Tori would be in her last few weeks of being a two year old. Disney doesn't charge you for your child until they are 3 years old, so she got in to the park FREE. And, because Matt gave them such Super-human height, Tori was tall enough to ride virtually everything! There were literally only two rides that she couldn't ride. Big Thunder Mountain is a great roller coaster- exciting and fun for even Isaac and Matt ( my adventure-loving boys!) and not too scary for Tori. Perfect.

Tarzan's Tree House!

We are not big Parade Watchers, but we did stop and see a little of this one on our way over to California Adventure!

Tori and I headed back to the hotel for nap time. Matt and the Kids had big fun over at California Adventure and we met them back at Disneyland later to try our luck at Space Mountain. Matt had Fast Passes from earlier in the day, so we walked right up to the head of the line. Love that!

Unfortunately, even though the girls were tall enough to ride space Mountain, it was NOT a big hit. Pretty much the saddest thing ever at Disneyland.

Even though we had Fast Passes for Soarin' Over California, we wtill had to wait for about five minutes. But we had lots of fun kissing to pass the time:

Next Stop: Dinner! I tend to prefer the food that we find at California Adventure... although it is still pretty pricey! We bought a Mickey Shaped Sourdough bread to supplement the food- Yum!

While the boys went on California Screamin', we girls headed over to King Triton's Carousel:

Now... if you are unfamiliar with Disneyland, this list won't mean much to you. We were so stoked about how much we were able to do in one day that we wrote it all out, just to remember!

Day 1:

Peter Pan
Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride
Dumbo
Mad Hatter's Tea Party
Buzz Light year x2
Big Thunder x2
Met Mickey
Met Minnie
Donald’s Boat
Gadget’s GO Coaster
Tarzan’s Tree House
Haunted Mansion
California Screamin’ x3
Soarin Over California x2
Mickey’s Ferris Wheel
Silly Symphony Swings
Grizzly River Rapids
Space Mtn.

Splash Mtn.
Triton’s Carousel
Indiana Jones

Whew!! We had so much fun on Day 1!! We were thankful for the great day and headed back to the hotel pretty exhausted, but happy as clams! Hopefully, I'll be able to post Day Two pics soon!