Sunday, February 27, 2011

Our Morning at the Beach

Okay, so I am a serious blogging slacker lately. I promise I'll do better next month! Anyways here are the beach pictures from our trip to California a whole month late. We had so much fun. It was my kids first trip to the beach ever! We went on a Friday morning before making the long drive back to Thatcher.  Even though it was January the weather was perfect. After 3 fun filled, excitement packed, expensive days in Disneyland, it was really nice to have some nice calm, relaxing, and cheap vacation time! Again, sorry that there are like a bazillion pictures. I guess it's just who I am!

 We brought lots of toys!


Last week the boys and I decorated some picture frames with sea shells that we collected from the beach, so that we could put pictures in them from our trip to the beach. I let Luke choose which picture he wanted in his frame. He chose this one below.


 These next three go in order. They just make me laugh. Grady wasn't the biggest fan of the waves.







Grady knows that shovels were really made to hit your big brother on the head with. Someday my kids will be nice to each other!

This is my favorite picture of Luke from the day. It just sums up his personality pretty well.



 Collecting sea shells.





The End.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Disneyland!!!

So I am really lame and blogging about this over a week late. Anyways, we went on a fun little family vacation to Disneyland just the 4 of us at the end of January. It was like our first real legitimate family vacation ever. I mean we've gone on vacation with our families and we've gone to visit our families, but this is the first time we ever paid for our own hotel rooms. We had a lot of fun. Disneyland really is the happiest place on earth, and we lived like kings! The weather was absolutely perfect, our hotel room was really reasonably priced, and the lines were super short (these are the perks of going to Disneyland during the off season)!  Luke was exactly 40 in. with his shoes on, and that meant that he could ride almost every ride! We took him on almost every ride too. I even took Luke on Tower of Terror. That was the only ride that actually made him cry (we only did that one once). Luke's favorite ride was Soarin' Over California. He rode that one 6 times over the 3 days that we were there. Grady's favorite part probably was just waiting in line. He loved climbing over, around, and through all of the bars and chains in the lines. He also loved any ride that you could call a train. Grady also got kissed twice: once by a cute little girl about his age, and once by a teenager from Japan. (More to come below on how much the Japanese people loved our children!) So here are a lot of pictures in pretty random order interspersed with my commentary.

I just loved the little hats we got the boys! They loved them too. Grady had his on almost the entire 3 days.

What family picture in front of the castle is complete without churros?


We just thought this was so cute. Grady fell asleep at the end of the first day like this in the stroller. Just a side note, I thought it was funny that every other stroller at Disneyland looked brand new. Then there was our sun bleached, dirty old hand-me-down stroller that didn't fit in. I think our stroller just screamed "We are hicks from a small town. This stroller is not used for walks in the mall. It is only used on rough outdoor terrain. "

So Disneyland now has this petting zoo attraction. It was pretty cool. The kids loved it. Ty and I swear that the animals were drugged though. The goats just lay on the ground and let the kids do whatever they wanted to them. The goats seemed half asleep the whole time. What kind of goats do that in real life?


Another family picture. Luke is proudly displaying his driver's licence that he earned on Autotopia.






My kids loved the bubbles that some of the workers would blow.

We went and watched this cool Mickey dance party show. Our kids were dancing fools!





This is what Grady looked like most of the trip. He just absolutely loved playing in all the bars.


We got to watch this great new show at California Adventure called World of Color twice. We got awesome seats on the second night.


Okay, so here is the really funny part. The whole trip, our kids had gotten quite a bit of attention from all the Asian people at the park, but on the third day we were waiting for the park to open when our children were swarmed by a huge pack of Japanese people. They absolutely went crazy over our kids! When I put Grady's Mickey hat on him the crowd went wild! You seriously would have thought that our kids were world-wide celebrities. These people were picking up my kids right and left and posing for pictures with them. I didn't know whether to be flattered, or whether to say "Hey, don't pick-up my kid!" Ty felt embarrassed that they weren't paying any attention to any of the other white kids around us. In the end we just stepped back and enjoyed the whole thing, and I took pictures.



My favorite ride. I'm getting pretty good too, if I do say so myself!

So cute!

This is the backside of recording artist Seal. (I was too embarrassed to take a picture of him from the front.) He was there with his kids. We didn't see Heidi Klum though. The day before we saw Patton Oswalt, who was the voice of Remy on Ratatouille (on of Luke's favorite movies) with his family.

Grady putting his hands in the air on the ride. So cute!



So I changed my mind, the Carousel was probably Grady's favorite ride.




All of us on the Monorail, which is still one of Luke's favorite rides.

On day 4 we went to the beach, to take our boys to see the ocean for their very first time. More on that to come!