Disneyland

I think the kids thoroughly enjoyed their first trip to Disneyland. We got 3-day park hoppers for Josh, Sydney, and I during our vacation to Newport Beach. We decided to go to Disneyland the first day we got there because the weather was supposed to be the coolest that day. My parents and my brother Adam joined us on this trip and offered to take the twins for Sydney's first day to Disneyland, so we could do all the "big kid" rides that the twins wouldn't be able to do.

Josh traditionally rides the Matterhorn first every time he has gone to Disneyland. I was a little worried that this ride would be a rough one for Sydney to start out on and Sydney insisted that she was brave enough.

Here's her face after the ride was over. Disneyland was not feeling like the happiest place on earth at this point.

So her first ride was not her favorite. But she loved almost all the rides we went on with the exception of Pirates of the Caribbean, Splash Mountain, and Space Mountain. She was really insistent that she wanted to do Space Mountain even though I told her it was going to be scarier than Splash Mountain. There was a point in the ride I worried she might die of fright. I've never heard her scream so loud. All the kids loved the rides in Fantasyland though.

My parent's rode Alice in Wonderland with us on our last day. They took Natalie so they looked like they had a reason to be on this ride.

It was a great time to go to Disneyland. Very short lines for almost everything. I think the longest we ever waited was 20 minutes for a ride. We met a lot of characters on this trip, including all the princesses. It did help that we went to lunch at Ariel's grotto on our day with Sydney. We got Ariel, Belle, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White right away. This lunch was the highlight of her day. I wish we could have really captured her reaction. She was practically bouncing right out of her seat when the princesses starting coming in.

I won't include all the pictures of the characters since there are a lot of them. I think meeting the characters was Sydney's favorite part of Disneyland though. She was always reading with her autograph book and pen. Here are some of our favorites.

This one is at the beginning of Tanner and Natalie's first day. They aren't quite sure what to think of the giant Mickey next to them.

Natalie was pretty brave on everything. She's so small that I don't know how much she could really see but on every ride you could hear her going "Ooooh, ooooooh!"

Once the kids were sick of standing in lines and sitting in the stroller my parents and I took them to Tom Sawyer's island. Josh and Adam went off to enjoy some of the thrill rides. I think this was the highlight of the day for the twins, especially Tanner.

Tanner loved having so much freedom to explore everything.

Sydney and Natalie really loved this big pile of pirates' gold.

Our trip overlapped with Rich (Josh's brother) and Wende's family vacation to Disneyland. I still think it's so funny that we both planned trips there at the same time. We ran into them quite a lot in the parks.

Here we are waiting for the parade to start. As you can see my dad is especially excited for the parade.

Natalie danced to all the music throughout the parade. I've never really gotten into the parades before but my kids sure loved them!

Josh's favorite ride of the trip may have been at the half-way point coming home. We stayed over in St. George Saturday night and my cousin Jeremy let Adam and Josh test drive his new Lamborghini. Nothing like driving a car that costs more than your house!