Today we took the kids to Disneyland. Most of my family had work or wedding preparations to make and so we thought we would just get the kids out of the way, and have some fun while we were doing that. 😉
Upon walking into Disneyland, and just as we came up on main street, Goofy walked right in front of us:
Apparently the kids weren’t expecting Goofy to be walking down the street, and thought it was hilarious.
Lydia, has an obsession with Minnie Mouse, and walking down Main Street she saw Minnie mice EVERYWHERE she looked. Every few seconds she was pointing somewhere else and saying “Mee Mou! Mee Mou!” .
We decided to start the day in Tomorrow land and the first thing we came up to was Star Tours. Last time the kids came to Disneyland, was before I found out that we were pregnant with Chloe, and Kyle wasn’t with us that time. So last time we were at Disneyland Jeremy and Dinah were too small to go on Star Tours. This time Chloe, Lydia and Adam were too small. So I stayed outside with them while Kyle took the older kids in. The people working Star Tours did give Chloe a coupon to come back and get to the front of the line when she is tall enough to go on it. We’ll see if we can keep that from getting lost. 😛
Next it was my turn to take the kids on Astro Orbiter while Kyle waited with Lydia and Adam. After that as we walked to see what to do next, the kids spotted some storm troopers and had to have a picture taken:
By the way, notice that they are all wearing m&m shirts. We all wore our m&m shirts and people thought that was the coolest thing. People that work at Disneyland told us that they see a lot of groups come in wearing similar clothing, but that our idea was pretty original. 😉
The storm troopers had another engagement that they needed to be getting to and so we went on our way as well. Ethan saw something on the map about a Jedi Training show that was supposed to be starting in a few minutes and it was right around the corner from where we were so we decided to check it out. In the show the Jedi and his assistant “used the force” to select a whole bunch of kids from the audience to attend “training”. They put each kid in a jedi robe, and handed them a light saber and then taught them some moves. THEN Darth Vader and Darth Maul and some storm troopers arrived. Each kid had to fight off either Darth Vader or Darth Maul with their newly acquired skills and then they went away.
I took the older kids on Space Mountain. After we were quite a ways through the line Jeremy turned to me and said “I don’t want to go”. I told him that at this point he just has to because Kyle was nowhere near us and I couldn’t just send Jeremy to go find him, and I wasn’t going to get out of line either! There was a single lady in line ahead of us and she offered to ride next to one of the kids so they wouldn’t be alone. So Tyra sat next to her, and Ethan and Dinah sat next to each other, and I sat with Jeremy. Space Mountain was awesome as always, and Jeremy was fine and even admitted that it wasn’t so bad, and we got off the ride and went to see the pictures that it took of our space ship. Pretty much you could see me in the back and the other lady in the front, and you could see the top of Tyra’s head but all the other kids were just gone, “ghost children”. They all had their heads ducked so far down the camera couldn’t see them at all. We went to find Kyle and he had lunch for us, and while we ate he went on Space Mountain.
We then went over to Autopia. We had to split up again, because this time even Ethan was too short to ride by himself. Ethan thought he could do it, but when we got in the car he couldn’t steer and reach the pedal to make it go, at the same time. So I pushed the pedal and I let him steer.
Next we went on a Buzz Lightyear ride. This one is a new one to the park and I don’t think it was much of a keeper. Basically you get in the ride and then you grab a lazer gun that is attached to the ride, and you try to “shoot” all the Zurg symbols through the whole ride. So it was like a moving video game ride. Interesting, but not something I think will be around for very long.
By this time it was starting to get a bit warm and we decided it was perfect time to go to the Tiki Room.
We didn’t get dole whips while we were there, so we will have to make sure we do that NEXT time we go to Disneyland. After the Tiki Room we went to the Jungle Cruise.
By this time Kyle’s ankles were feeling sore, and so he stayed on the ground with a sleeping Lydia and Adam, while I took the others through Tarzan’s tree house. I still remember when it was Swiss Family Robinson’s tree house. The kids didn’t really want to stop and look at anything in the tree house. Dinah basically tried to run through the whole thing as fast as she could.
Kyle wanted to do something to sit down and get out of the heat so next we went on Pirates of the Caribbean. They have changed that ride, which makes me sad. I thought that they had come up with the Pirates movie to kind of go along with the ride, considering they were coming up with other movies that went along with Disneyland rides (Haunted Mansion, Country Bears). But now they seem to have modified the ride to make it go more along with the movie. They added projected scenes of pirates from the movies. It really just makes me sad that they have taken a ride that has been there for as long as I can remember and they are making it lame. We discovered that they did similar things to the Haunted Mansion ride too. 🙁
After Pirates we were in the neighborhood of New Orleans Square and that meant it was time for mint juleps and apple fritters! So we stopped and had snacks. 🙂 There were some older people sitting at a table across from us, and the older lady was very impressed by the size of our family. I think she also liked to look at their cute faces. She sat there looking at our kids and telling us of when her kids were young. She thought it was funny to watch the kids make a mess of the powdered sugar that came on their beignets (donut like things, apparently the Mint Julep bar doesn’t sell apple fritters anymore, just Mickey shaped beignets, and so Kyle had to go to another place to get the fritters).
We spent the late afternoon and evening trying to do as much in Fantasyland as we could, but it was getting harder as they started shutting off areas for fireworks. They seem to be trying to get more and more impressive with their fireworks shows, however I think they tried too hard and it ended up being a pretty lame fireworks show. They had fireworks going off from three different spots, which meant you kept turning your head every which direction so that you could try to see them all. The “music” that they played to go with the fireworks, were basically just sound clips from the various rides. And they had scenes projected onto Small World that I think was supposed to go with it all. Fantasmic was WAY better. At least for that show, you knew that you could stand anywhere facing the water and you would see most of the show and the music was amazing. I remember the show they did when I was a kid. Tinkerbell would fly off the Matterhorn and signal the start of the fireworks. Tonight’s show was just extremely lame to the point that we really lost interest in watching it so we tried to get a few more rides in despite being trapped in a certain area of the park.
Throughout the day we also tried to keep our eyes open for the penny smasher machines. Kyle asked at one of the shops if they knew where all of the machines were and they gave him a map showing what machines were where. Unfortunately, it needs some major updating. The princess smasher wasn’t at the shop by small world like the map said. We couldn’t find a set of the ones it listed in tomorrow land. There weren’t any machines in the penny arcade like the map said. And the Lincoln memorial building had some other machines that weren’t listed as being there. Eventually all the kids found a penny that they wanted and everything was good. By that time though, the park was closed and they were moving everybody out. We went across the way to the Main Street stores and let each of the kids pick a souvenir, and it was time to go back to Grandpa’s house.