Disneyland!

Before Christmas we took a much-anticipated trip to Disneyland and had a wonderful time together. We are so blessed to enjoy each other's company so very much!

Here are some of our favorite stories and memories from the trip:

The Drive

Steve: The car ride.  Uggghhh.  10 hours to Anaheim is still better than 18 to Orlando though.

Jamie: A 10-hour car ride is still really long, but it sure is easier with bigger kids who can entertain themselves and mostly regulate their own bodily functions. Although our trip to Disney was everybody's main gift, we did do a Christmas gift for each kid and the boys talked us into combining their gift (plus a little lot) to get a Nintendo Switch for the car ride. Loading up 6 people plus a monitor, power inverter, and gaming system seemed exactly like how our family would do a road trip. One of my favorite memories was waking up at 3 am on the drive home to a jubilant, semi-coherent Sam announcing he had just beaten Super Mario Odyssey.

Ben: Ooh and I really liked the Switch, too. The Switch was fun because we got to use it in the car. We played Snipper Clips and Poyo Poyo Tetris and Mario Cart and Overcooked. It was a long drive. It made the drive go funner and a little faster, but the sleep made the drive go even faster.

Disneyland

Steve:  I have so many happy memories going to Disney.  Disneyland is so familiar and yet so different from the Magic Kingdom at Disneyworld.  It's so much fun to see the wonder in the faces when we're there, the unexpected magic around the corner, the buoyant excitement about the characters, the reluctant hands being pulled by hyperactive feet to the next ride screeching "Hurry up!" while the slower ones reply "Calm down Dad!"

WanYing: My favorite ride was Guardians of the Galaxy the Breakout drop tower. because it goes really fast up and down.

Sam: Absolutely the Guardians breakout was the best, for pretty much the same reasons WanYing liked it. It's a great ride, with some pretty cool stuff to look at in the line before. I've always liked negative Gs, and since it bounced several times you could feel the negatives in abundance.

Ben: The Groot costume was pretty neat. He was really tall and pretty squishy. It was rubbery but it looked like wood.

Sasha: My favorite memory was Groot was trying to eat the sparkles from my hair.

Jamie: I know this sounds super-lame, but one of my favorite rides was Storybook Land. I had never been on it before and it was a chill and sweet oasis between thrill rides. And I'm a sucker for bonsai shrubs around miniature houses.

Sasha: My favorite ride was California Screamin' because it was really fast and it had a loop-do-loop and a lot of other people in my family like it.

WanYing: My favorite character that I went to see was Mickey and Minnie mouse. Because Mickey and Minnie are my favorite Disney characters.

Jamie:  My favorite character meet-up was catching Chip and Dale in their treehouse playground. We were the only people around, and they took a ton of time to play sassy with Sasha, including tons of hilarious poses, all of which were calculated to block her face from any photo I could take. It was a lot of fun just to play together with such characters.

Steve: My favorite ride was Space Mountain.  It's so thrilling in the dark and it always makes me giddy to go into outer space.  Sasha was way nervous about the ride and chickened out for our first pass at the ride.   She finally got the courage to go after much cajoling and encouragement and she was grinning ear to ear when we had another pass to go right on again.

Beach Day

Jamie:  One of my favorite days was our down-day when we went to the beach and aquarium. There was a lot of confusion among our girls between the ocean and the Great Salt Lake (e.g. Me: "I don't think WanYing's ever been to the beach before." Sasha: "Yeah she has, remember when we went and floated and there were all those gnats?"). Although it was pretty cold for the ocean, it was great to spend a few hours absorbing the sun and letting the kids collect shells and hypothermia in the water.

Ben: Going to In-n-Out was weird because there were a ton of people there. It was really popular, and it was huge.

Jamie: We also headed to the Long Beach Aquarium where we ended up buying annual passes because they were cheaper than purchasing single-day tickets for our family. Apparently they aren't used to Utah-sized families.

The Aquarium was fantastic - tons of touch pools, a great sea lion show, and we even got to feed the birds these little cups of nectar that they went crazy for.

And we finished up the day with a seafood dinner, where Ben ate his first crab and lobster and WanYing enjoyed her first oyster! It was quite the day of first experiences for our Ying!

Princess-tastic

WanYing: My best memory was going to Bibbity Bobbity Botique with my sister, my mom, and my grandmother.

Jamie: We figured this was our final little-kid trip to Disney, so we decided to do it right, including a princess treatment at the Bibbity Bobbity Boutique and a princess lunch at Ariel's Grotto. Sasha had a good time, but WanYing especially loved it. That girl can't get enough of face painting, glitter, and all the accoutrements of the royal treatment. I loved seeing the girls strut around in their fairy dust and sashes, absorbing all the fun of the experience.

Sasha: Rapunzel was my favorite character because we were wearing the same dresses and I like her little pet chameleon and her long hair.

Sam: I think my favorite memory of the trip was seeing everyone else have a good time, even when I didn't care too much for the specific ride or attraction we were on. For example, I didn't really care about the character lunch, but seeing the girls excited about getting signatures and talking to princesses was really fun.

Family Magic

We had a really great trip to Disneyland. It really is a delightful place, and I'm so grateful we could all go together and enjoy it. It's crazy to think that Sam will be in college before we return - wow! It's a good reminder to enjoy these years of princess dresses and signature books while they last.

WanYing 6 years ago on Mickey's Fun Wheel

Some things never change...