California Trip - Day one at Disney

We got up super early to hit Disney right away the next morning. We invited Antonio's brother and his wife to this vacation even though it was a trip with my family. We had two reasons for doing so. First, they live in Arizona and we don't get to see them often. They aren't super far from SoCal and we take advantage of any opportunity to see them both! Second, Uncle Mister is in the Air Force, and a ticket to Disney with a military discount is about half the cost of a regular ticket. And way cheaper than any discounts or promotions you can find. We saved A LOT of money by purchasing our tickets with him for my entire family! At first we thought we could only get 4 (which still would have been worth it), but the ticket lady was super awesome and said we could do it for all 18 of us. Yay! I was worried I wouldn't be able to do much because I'm pregnant, but I quickly realized that there were only a few rides I couldn't do, one of which is shut down for the whole summer anyway. We hit the family fav first....Space Mountain.

On to Astro Blasters where Rocket enjoyed shooting the aliens with Buzz Lightyear.

Uncle Gee and Snooks got in on the action.

The group headed to star tours while I sat with the littles.

 

Then we had fun on space orbiters

 

Autotopia was our next stop, but we had a bit of a mishap while waiting walking up. There wasn't much of a line, so the workers had chained off a bunch of the corralling area since it wasn't needed yet. Rocket was excited and running through really quickly, but wasn't paying attention. We ran full speed into one of the chains and clothes lined himself on the face. Poor kid was in a bad mood after that and took quite a bit of coaxing to get him into the cars. We kept screaming, "I just want to go home now!" Once in the car with me he had a great time, though his driving needs more practice.

 

Gambit was our map reader.

We took the train...

To visit Jack Sparrow...

And climb Tarzan's tree house.

Some went to visit Indiana Jones....

While others watched a performance from some famous chipmunks.

 

We all watched the evening parade together, which was pretty cool.

We ended the day in Fantasy Land.

After the late night fire works show, half of us went home to put the tired kids to bed, and the others were thrilled (or not) with Splash Mountain.

 

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California Trip - driving down

We had a fabulous little reunion with my parents and siblings at Disneyland. Because the costs of flights were so expensive, we decided to drive down. I'll admit that I was very worried about how that would work out (I hate road trips)! The boys were great on the way down. Antonio had a great idea of making each kid their own car box with new and special things. We picked up little toys and goodies and filled a box for each of them. They got to choose one thing from their box about every hour. It worked great! It kept them entertained which kept my sanity!

An interesting modification to a beetle bug that the boys thought was funny.

Mt Shasta was beautiful!

"You Only Live Once"

We stopped in Sacramento for the night. We ate at the Elephant Bar and got to sit right next to the large elephant coming out of the wall. Some of the kids had ordered macaroni and Antonio told them that the elephants butt was in the kitchen because it pooped out the macaroni. They all, of course, thought this was quite hilarious.

 

Getting the wiggles out before bedtime. The hotel had a big conference going on that weekend and I'm sure our wall mates were none to pleased to be sleeping next to us. We safely made it to Anaheim the next day and prepped for our awesome week at Disney!

 

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Cowboys

A friend of mine had an adorable first birthday for her son. It was an awesome party and decorated so amazingly with a barnyard/cowboy theme. The boys had fun dressing up and being silly.

Gambit is sporting his first mustache.

The Lone Ranger.

Ninja is looking eerily similar to Papa!

 

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