Family Vacation part 1 - Disneyland

We spent last week with the Kiehn side of the family on vacation in southern California. Danny's brother Todd and his family came from Austin, Texas and Danny's parents drove down from the East Bay. We drove down on Tuesday and all was good in the car until the batteries died in the DVD players. We have one and borrowed one, so when Claire's died first she was not happy. Luckily we also had headphones.


When there was no more Barney to watch Claire was looking playing with a sticker book and thought it would be fun to stick them in her hair - or at least until they need to be removed. She was also eating Oreos in the car which I would not recommend. There were a lot of brown crumbs everywhere!

We had dinner at the Rainforest Cafe in Downtown Disney on Tuesday night. Again, it was all good until the faux thunderstorm. Andrew did not like the sound of the thunder. Claire loved the large fish tanks with the beautiful tropical fish. Andrew and his cousins Ron and Alex played on the Legos outside the Lego store after dinner.

We arrived at the park at 10:00 am ready to ride some rides. It was a beautiful spring day with lots of sunshine!

Here are the grandparents with 3 of the 4 grand kids on the trip.

Claire decided to help us navigate the park. The lack of reading skills proved to be her downfall though. About this time, we realized that we may have made a mistake by bringing our kids to Disneyland too soon. Andrew would not go on the first two rides that Danny tried to take him on. He proclaimed that he would not be going on any ride that is too loud, dark, scary, or fast. Surprisingly enough, Disneyland has many of these type of rides.

He desperately wanted to go on Dumbo. That is is favorite ride. He went on it twice. He would have ridden this all day if we let him. We continued our day riding safe rides like Autotopia, It's a Small World, Story Book cruise, and Jungle Cruise (well except for the gun shots).

While they rode Dumbo Claire rode the carousel twice. Even though the picture doesn't show it, she loves carousels. She was made because I walked away to take the picture.

And then I tried to get a nice family picture in front of the castle. First, I tried one with the kids. Claire wouldn't look up and then she decided that she had had enough of the stroller.

So, I let her out of the stroller in hopes that they would stand next to each other for a lovely sibling shot in front of the castle. That was not going to happen either Claire insisted on pushing the stroller around while Andrew attacked her with his imaginary light saber. By the way, this picture was taken about 6:00 pm. Claire never got back in that stroller. She only wanted to push it. So imagine this - Andrew is inside the stroller, Claire is pushing it from the back, and I am also pushing it and steering it so that we don't hit anyone. This continued for the next 3 hours.

Then Danny said, "why don't you get in the picture?" Well, Claire didn't want to be held and so we gave up on the photo opp. We had planned on staying until 9:30 to watch the fireworks, but Andrew fell asleep in the stroller at 8:30 pm, so we decided to head back to the hotel. Luckily, we were just across the street and ended up being able to see the fireworks from the hotel. Stay tuned for the Legoland adventures.