Our Trip to California

WARNING! This is a very long post with a lot of pictures. It's hard to choose your favorites when there are 200 pictures to choose from.

Danny had a conference in San Diego this past weekend, so we took advantage of his company paying his airfare and we went along to take our girls to Disneyland for the first time. Here they are dressed and ready for an exciting day.

Grandma and Grandpa Miner went along to enjoy the day with us. They have season passes and we enjoyed having two more adults along to help out with the girls. Here we are on the tram ride from the parking lot.
After walking from the tram drop off to the front gate(carrying Ashley), we all decided it was worth the money to rent a stroller for the day. Grandma and Grandpa were nice enough to pay for it with their pre-paid Disney cash card. Here we are waiting for them to return. As you can see from the picture, Alyssa and Ashley are in awe of all there is to look at.

Before we got there, Alyssa had told us that she was most excited to ride the teacups ride. Here is she is fulfilling her wish.

Her favorite princess is Snow White. When we started talking about Disneyland a couple of months ago, we told her that she could wear a princess dress to the park. She told us a couple of weeks later that she wanted to wear a Snow White dress. Fortunately, we found one at a consignment sale at the end of August. At Disneyland, we had to do the Princess Walk in order to meet the princesses. We were fortunate that Snow White was one of them.

I included this one too because I thought it was cute that Sleeping Beauty got Alyssa to hold her dress out like a princess.

Of course, the girls had to meet Mickey Mouse too. The wait was a lot shorter to meet Mickey than it was to meet the princesses.

This picture doesn't have anything to do with our day at Disneyland, I just thought that Alyssa looked like a little model in it.

Grandpa was nice enough to push the stroller around all day and stay with Ashley for all of the rides that she was too little to ride (we were sad to discover that she was just one inch too short to ride everything that Alyssa could. We were happy, however, that she could ride as much as she could. One of the benifits of having tall children).

Ashley was most excited about going on the train. We went on it right after she woke up from a two hour nap in the stroller(which Grandpa so kindly held back on two wheels so that she could sleep laying down for most of that two hours)

I wanted to get a picture in front of the famous Sleeping Beauty Castle, but there was too much excitment to start riding rides at the beginning of the day and the front of the castle was blocked off at the end of the day, so we had to settle for our picture in front of the Disneyland sign on the hill.

We were glad that Grandma and Grandpa came with us, even if the girls don't look very happy abour it in this picture (they were pretty tired and clingy at this point).

The very next day, we headed to Pasedena to meet up with Grandpa Wheeler, Aunt Maryn, and cousin Robbie. We started with lunch at McDonalds. We were going to go to a park, but it was a cold and drizzly day, so we opted for an indoor playplace. After lunch, we went to a children's museum, called Kidspace. All three kids had a blast.

It made me laugh to see how creepy Ashley looks crawling out of this ant hole.

Alyssa crawled out so fast that I made her get back in it so that I could get a picture of her.

They loved riding these little tricycles. Alyssa liked driving Robbie. Robbie didn't like that so much.

I think Danny was making them laugh in this shot by pretending to be a spider (they are standing on a spider web). We had a fun day with some of the Wheeles and both kids fell asleep on the way home.

That night, Danny left us to go to the Dodgers/Padres game at Dodger Stadium with his Dad and brothers. He spent the night at his brothers house and then went on to his Conference the following morning. We missed having him around, but were glad that he was finally able to get some relief from his cat allergy (My parents own a cat who was banned from the house while we were there, but that still wasn't enough to help Danny).

On Thursday, we headed back to the Disneyland Resort to go to the other Amusement Park, California Adventure. Alyssa was excited to ride some more rides.

She got to meet another princess.

She got picked to dance on the stage for the High School Musical Steet Performance.

There wasn't as much to do at this park, especially for Ashley, so it was a much slower paced, relaxing day. We were worried when we started the day off with two grumpy, sleep-deprived kids, but they got better once they saw all the fun stuff around them. We stayed even later this night so that we could watch a "World of Colors" light/water show over the water in this park. Ashley fell asleep in her stroller during the show and Alyssa fell asleep on the tram ride back to the car. They both slept all the way home and didn't wake up on the way to their beds.

We spent a peaceful morning at Grandma's house on Friday and then headed off to the beach after lunch. It was a nice beach day considering it was the end of September. We were fortunate that Friday was the first day of a week-long heat wave. The water was a bit cold, but that didn't stop Ashley from getting soaked. Alyssa liked playing in the sand. I helped her build a sand castle.

There were plenty of feathers around as there were plenty of seagulls. 50 of them enjoyed sharing our caramel popcorn that we left unguarded when I had to take Alyssa to the bathroom. It was probably one of the most expensive snacks they had ever gotten into as it was leftover from Disneyland. I had flashbacks to another beach trip that I took with Danny when we were engaged, when we watched a flock of seagulls inhale a bag of chips that belonged to some people next to us. It was one of the first good laughs that we remember sharing together(you know, the ones where you laugh so hard that you cry). This time I was on the recieving end of the laughs which were heard by the people sitting next to us. Alyssa and Ashley had fun chasing the birds away with me.

We spent Saturday recovering from our busy week and flew back yesterday. It was a really fun week and Alyssa's newest favorite place to go is Disneyland. Her favorite rides were "It's a Small World"(Disneyland) and the Grizzly River Rapids ride(California Adventure).