Category: Our Family

The whole reason for our visit to California this month, was to attend Tiffany and Christian’s wedding. First thing this morning, before I had any desire to be awake, Tiffany had her bridesmaids and hair dresser over to start getting ready for the day, and her photographer was there as well to start capturing every little moment. Everyone else in the house woke up a little later. While everyone else in the house got themselves ready for the day, Kyle and I got all of our munchkins ready, and we got ourselves ready. It was at this point that I remembered that I didn’t actually have anything for Adam to wear. I had been looking for a suit that would go with his peach tie, but I couldn’t find one suitable in his size. The suit that he wears to church is a nice blue color and that was NOT going to go with a peach tie. So he ended up just wearing a onesie to the temple.

Mom & Dad took Tiffany and left for the temple earlier than we did. Wendy took the bridesmaids and , and Patsy took Jonathan and David, and Kyle and I and our kiddos went in our own van. Before we left, Dad called to ask that we grab the bag in the garage that had the bouquet and the rings in it. I got the message and grabbed it and we were on our way. Traffic was terrible! Everywhere we have gone on these California freeways has taken forever, just because there are so many cars on the road that they can’t actually go a decent speed. We haven’t seen very many accidents at all, yet every freeway, at any time of day, has just been congested. So as time ticked on and we weren’t getting much closer to the temple, I got more and more nervous and stressed out. I have no idea where Wendy and Patsy’s cars were, but I knew they were behind us somewhere because we pulled out and left before we did. Dad called from the temple to tell us that it’s not actually a white wedding so to just come in as soon as we get there and not to worry about changing first. Then he asked who we had with us to watch the kids. Nobody had come with us, and I told him so, and he started to flip out about how he said to make sure someone else rode with us so they could watch the kids and we could get right in, instead of having to wait for the others to arrive. I told him that everyone else just seamed to go to the other cars and that we would do the best we could. As we were finally coming up to the temple, I called Wendy to find out where they were. They were still on the freeway, which added to my stress. We parked at the temple and Kyle and I got out and were wondering what to do when I saw Sandy coming up to us. Apparently she wasn’t sure exactly how to get to the temple, but when she saw the white 12 passenger van with Utah plates on the freeway, she decided to follow it, and it led her straight to the temple….yup it was us! 😉

We went inside and saw mom and dad at the front desk, apparently they had talked to the temple workers and it was decided that the wedding would be a white wedding after all. They were saying that they don’t do white weddings any more unless they had special permission, and when Tiffany was upset that she couldn’t have the white wedding that she was hoping for, they decided to go ahead and let her have it. So they had to go back to the chapel and tell everyone to go change, and because they had to send everyone to go change, they weren’t really waiting for us. We had made it. Now I could relax a bit. Wendy arrived and changed and we still had to sit and wait for awhile before they took us to the sealing room. As we were on the way to the sealing room, someone asked me if I had brought in the rings. I hadn’t. We were in such a hurry to get to the temple, that when we got there and rushed inside, I had forgotten all about the rings. My stress level went through the roof at this point. I was afraid that everyone was going to be mad at me for forgetting the rings and leaving them in the van. I quietly waited to see how this was going to unfold. The sealing ceremony was performed and then the sealer said that they could exchange rings. It was then that it was said that we didn’t have them there, but that there was to be a ring ceremony later. Turns out that if they had exchanged rings there in the temple they would have not been able to have a ring ceremony later, so it all really did work out, and I could breath again.

Back in the dressing rooms we changed back into what we were wearing for the wedding pictures and I tried to find the others before going outside. One of the temple workers came to me to ask if I knew where my mom was. She couldn’t find her, and they needed her to help Tiffany to get ready for the pictures. I just walked down the row of changing stalls and called (quietly) for mom. She heard me, and I told her that the temple workers were looking for her. Then I went out and found Kyle and we went outside to wait for the grand exit of the newlyweds. Someone got the bouquet from me and ran it back into the temple so that Tiffany could be holding it when they made their grand exit, and then we waited. We found the kids and my siblings that were watching them. Debby had Adam and asked me if I knew my baby was naked. I said that I know he was wearing just an undershirt and tried to explain the whole issue about not being able to find a suitable suit, and then I saw him and exclaimed “Where is his shirt!?”, she again pointed out that “Ya, he’s NAKED” (aside from the diaper that is). Kyle decided at this point that he was going to go make a run to Macy’s to get the boy something to wear. Macy’s, just being down the street by the freeway, he thought that he could get there and back quickly and everything would be ok. He ended up missing Tiffany and Christian’s exit, and most of the pictures. 🙁

Lydia seemed to really like Sandy:

And the other kids liked watching the water fountain while they waited for their turn to be in more pictures.

I really like this picture of Patsy and Tiffany. I have NO idea what they were talking about, but it sure looks interesting:

Once we were told that they were all done with taking pictures of our family at the temple, Kyle and I loaded up the kids and we headed back to my parent’s house. However, we spent what seemed like FOREVER in the car trying to get to my parent’s house. Living out of state, I really, really do not miss California freeways. We finally got back to the house, and while my parents got ready for the reception. I got our things packed up and back in the van because we had to leave right after the reception to head back home to Utah.

My parent’s and siblings all helped load stuff up to take to the reception and then they left for the reception. Kyle and the kids and I stayed at the house a little longer to get some more of our stuff loaded into the van, before we headed to the reception. The first part of the reception was the ring ceremony:

Their bishop had a few things to say, and then they got to exchange their rings, and then everyone was turned loose to mingle while the music played. A little later they cut the cake, and I just love this picture of Tiffany and Christian. I think I will have to print it out for them:

Here is a better picture of them cutting the cake:

I spent most of the evening wandering around and making sure my kids were all still in the cultural hall and that they weren’t getting into trouble. I did get to talk to a lot of people from my parent’s ward that still remember me, and I got to talk to a lot of our extended family that came. Soon though, it was time for the bouquet toss:

I totally caught the bouquet in mid-air. Caught it in the picture I mean, not actually caught it with my hands 😛

Christian removed the garter. He started out with using his teeth, but it turned out rather difficult to get it off over her cowboy boots using his teeth, so he gave up and used his hands for that part:

Then Tiffany had a dance with Dad:

After Christian had a dance with his mom, and Christian and Tiffany were dancing together they opened up the dance floor to everyone, and Kyle and I started rounding up kids so we could get going. Despite Tiffany’s freaking out, everything turned out nicely, and just like I had told her, at the end of the day all that matters is that you’re married. 🙂

Today we spent in preparations for the wedding. Tiffany wanted to go with her sisters to get nails done, and in the end, only Tiffany and Patsy and I were able to go. I took my girls with me so they could also get their nails done. I didn’t actually get acrylic nails, but this was my first experience with a pedicure. 🙂 Patsy and Tiffany also had pedicures and each got acrylic nails. When it was the kids turn to have their nails clipped and painted, the lady looked at them and turned to me with a confused expression, and pointed out that there wasn’t much nail to clip (they still bite their nails even though we have been trying to get them to stop that for quite some time) and she asked me what I wanted her to do. I asked her to just try to even them out and them paint them. The girls were really excited to have their nails done, and later I again reminded them of how important it is for them to stop chewing on their finger nails.

While we were getting our nails done, Tiffany received a message on her phone saying that the best man wasn’t going to be able to make it to the wedding tomorrow morning, and she started having a melt down. I told her to relax, and not to worry about it. I pointed out that she had a lot more ready than I did at that point on the day before my wedding. Seriously, at that point on the day before my wedding, my mom still hadn’t even started sewing my dress, in fact she had JUST STARTED working on the dresses for my sisters! Patsy, fully agreed with me on that, and I continued to tell Tiffany that in the end, after all is said and done, all that really matters is that she is married. I think that helped her a little, but that didn’t stop her from being upset that her nails didn’t turn out perfectly. She ended up having the lady take them off and redo them. We were there until closing time and I think those lady’s were very glad to see us leave.

Back at my parent’s house, after eating dinner, Kyle and I got to work on making the pudding desserts for the reception. My parents had bought cute little individual serving size cups, and Kyle and I and Jonathan made up the pudding and put them into their cups. Then we had to get creative in figuring out how to get all those trays of cups into the fridge so they could chill and be stored until it’s time to take them to the reception tomorrow. I think the stress of impending wedding is starting to get to everyone. The whole house was just full of chaos as everyone was doing something to get ready for the wedding tomorrow morning.

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.

It’s been interesting these last few years that we have had kids in school, to see the kinds of field trips they have gone on. I have seen them go on field trips to the zoo, or Ethan once went to Thanksgiving point, they also sometimes have a “walking field trip” to a nearby park. A while ago Jeremy had a field trip to the “CAL Ranch Store”. Tyra has a field trip coming up to go to a planetarium at BYU, and Ethan will be going to Utah lake, and to a natural history museum before this school year is over. Thinking of all these places made Kyle and I reminisce to when we were in elementary school and what kinds of field trips we went on. We both remember field trips that included some tide pools, and we both remember going to the “La Brea Tar Pits”. We went and found some tide pools last time we were in California, so this time we made time for the tar pits!

We started our visit waiting for the tour to start while the kids tried to lift the metal poles out of some tar:

The tour began, and we went to follow the guide.

I thought he seemed like a guy who REALLY likes what he does, and he seemed to know a lot about the different fossils  in the museum. However we soon noticed that most of the kids were getting bored, and the guide just wasn’t moving fast enough to keep their interest, so we had to go on ahead and do our own self guided tour. In this picture I love the look of surprise on Jeremy’s face!

Tyra wanted to size her arm span up with the mammoth’s tusks:

That meant that Dinah wanted to size her arm span up with the large bird’s wing span:

Some of the kids were really interested in watching a real paleontologist working on real fossils in the “Fishbowl lab”.

Jeremy being silly yet again:

After we finished looking at everything inside the museum we decided to go out and explore the atrium. It was very pretty with all the plants and the small water fall. I think the kids got a kick out of seeing a whole bunch of turtles.

When we first walking into the museum, and Kyle was buying tickets, the kids got really excited to find souvenir penny smasher machines. You may remember that when we were in North Carolina they were introduced to this concept, and I had since found penny passports for them to keep their smashed pennies in, and penny smashing machines here at the tar pits meant they got to add a second penny to their collection. So when we were finished checking out the atrium and we were about ready to go, we lined all the kids up on the bench while I tried to figure out how many quarters and how many pennies I had. 😉

I am really glad we were able to make time to visit the La Brea Tar Pits. I think most of the kids really enjoyed it too, of course Lydia and Adam don’t really care very much, but they were pleasant sitting in the stroller and just checking things out.