Vacations

We thought the many little boys of our group would enjoy a red Cars-themed shirt, and we were right!

Caroline spent some quality time with Wynne while we were all getting ready:

Time to head to California Adventure!

We got there before the park officially opened, so we spent some time with Walt and Mickey:

Toy Story Mania was first on our list of things to do!  Of course that meant we needed pictures of everyone looking goofy with the glasses:

Shoot!  Blurry picture of Caroline and Haley.  They still look cute, though, so I’m including it:

Cars shirts in Cars Land:

Caroline was a little nervous to ride the Cars ride, but she was brave:

Looks like we have some terrified Tower of Terror riders:

Madison giggled and giggled at Sulley from afar.  Up close she wasn’t so sure:

We spent some more quality time with Walt:

My Mom looked so cute holding Madison and feeding her treats that I had to snap a picture.  Madison!  Look up!

Let’s try this again:

Hmmm.  That’s a strange face.  One more time:

Brooooooooke!

I pawned Madison off on Haley, and Dallas took the other kids on the trolley leaving me just enough time to ride Tower of Terror with my parents, Sarah, Ben, and some guy from New Jersey:

We spent a lot of time in the wilderness survival area playing:

And posing:

Someone give this girl a modeling contract!

Almost the whole group met up to watch the Pixar parade:

Everyone, show us your Mickey ears!

This monster ran right up to the little kids and startled us all:

We ended the day with a group dinner at the park:

Legoland was up next on our vacation itinerary.  Before our trip my family designed four T-shirts for us to wear when we visited the theme parks. The Legoland shirt was awesome!

Of course we had to start our day off right with a picture at the house before leaving:

Then we took a quick pic with the whole crew outside of the park:

And just for good measure, another family picture:

We saw lots of fun Lego creations:

Madison went right up to this pizza chef and kissed him on the belly:

We rode lots of cool rides:

Brooke at the Fairy Tale Brook:

The kids loved driving their own cars all around the car area:

Nobody tell Madison that her car isn’t moving:

While I was watching Madison drive her car nowhere, this Lego cameraman…

…was taking a picture of this Lego lady…

…and I can’t tell you how many times I shrugged out of his way mumbling an apology for getting in his shot…only to realize I was talking to a pile of Legos.

Madison took a nap:

The kids made boats and raced them:

They also made cars to race:

They loved the Lego tables throughout the park and enjoyed playing here for a while:

We took a few more pictures:

Dallas and Caroline danced with the Lego Friends characters:

Caroline got soaking wet running through the water area:

I saw my sister’s pictures of the day and noticed she had taken pictures with some Lego characters.

Huh, I thought. We never saw any Lego characters.

Then I looked at our pictures:

Oh. I guess we did see one.

Legoland was fun for the kids but kind of frustrating for me and Dallas (and Madison).  Madison was too little to ride nearly every ride so one of us always had to sit out with her, which meant her day consisted of a lot of this:

We also had a hard time managing our range of ages and heights.  Spencer and Caroline often needed an adult each to sit by them in the ride which wasn’t possible unless we rode the ride in shifts or had my parents or siblings around to be ride buddies for everyone.

Adding to that struggle was the inconvenience of not having a park map for the first half of our day.  I don’t know how we missed getting one, but we wandered around not knowing where things were and apparently skipped over a lot of fun play areas.

Looking back on it now, I think I was comparing our park experience with our Disneyland park experiences from two years ago when we didn’t have a baby and only had three kids. At that time we were able to zip around the parks doing everything we wanted to without having to plan for naps or coordinating adults to ride with kids and we packed our day full of riding rides and seeing everything.  This time our pace was much slower which was okay once I accepted that this was the way things were going to be this time around.

Just as I had made our peace with Legoland, our kids got eaten by a shark:

If you think that Sunday is never a fun day…then you obviously didn’t spend the Sabbath with us on our trip.

We began with more French toast:

Then got ready and headed to the local ward to catch sacrament meeting:

After church most of us changed out of our nice clothes and at least one of us snuggled with Ben:

This was Claire’s position any time the TV was on in the living room:

We were all gathered together to have a special family reunion family home evening.

My older brother Jacob challenged each family to read the Book of Mormon before our trip.  We had already been working harder as a family to read our scriptures each night and had been doing better than we had ever done before.  By that I mean we were reading most nights, and each time we would read one column.  One measly little column.  I realize it’s not much, but it was better than the nothing we had been doing before, so we were feeling proud of ourselves.  However, this challenge made it so we had to pretty substantially increase our pace which we did, and we finished the Book of Mormon with a couple weeks to spare.  Hurrah!

Jacob also had the great(?) idea for each family to do a skit of a scripture story.  We could act it out live or film it beforehand and show the video.  I was really crabby about the idea of having to do this so I pretty much let Dallas and the kids take over, and they created a masterpiece:

I was super impressed with everyone’s skits and it ended up being really fun to watch what they had come up with.  I guess I can finally say, “Good idea, Jacob!”

After FHE, Spencer succumbed to the siren song of the toys yet again:

And Eli made this face furthering our opinion that he’s actually really an emoji:

Our Sunday traditions include my Dad making popcorn and the grand kids weren’t about to let him slack on those duties while on vacation, so he whipped up several batches:

The pool was beckoning to the children so we spent the rest of the evening splashing away:

Madison is the funniest little swim baby.  She was happiest when I was dunking her head completely under water:

Some of us ended the evening in footie pajamas:

While others unexpectedly wore matching pjs:

Still another unclogged the kitchen sink in minutes while wearing a suit and using no tools, a feat that the property manager was unable to do earlier that day after spending an hour trying.  That Dallas.  He’s a pretty great guy to have around.