Disneyland Day 1

Today we arrived home from our vacation to Disneyland! I am determined to not let documenting our trip overwhelm me, so I am just going to document one day at a time, and eventually I will finish! So here goes....


We have been wanting to take a trip to Disneyland for quite some time. We were just not ever able to make it happen until this year, and we couldn't have been more thrilled to plan our trip! Brandon's mom, and his sister Summer and her family went too. We had been anticipating our trip for months, and as it drew closer to the time for us to go, I began getting worried that our kids would get sick and we wouldn't be able to go. The flu is running rampant here and I was determined for us not to catch it. I armed my kids with antibacterial hand soap, and became a complete germaphobe. It all payed off and we managed to stay well. I didn't even think that there would be anything else that would hold us back. The day before we were set to leave we woke up to snow everywhere. We ended up having a huge snowstorm. In fact, we haven't had a snowstorm this big in October in 12 years and it happened to pick the day before and the day of our trip! While everyone else was praying for more snow and more school closures, we were just praying that our flight wouldn't get cancelled! We woke up early on Thursday to find it still coming down strong with no end in sight. We checked our flight every few minutes and were happy to see that it had not been cancelled. So we headed out to the airport. Daniel was kind enough to get up at 5:30 am to take us. He was anxiously watching the weather reports and flight statuses as well, because we was scheduled to fly to Mexico to see Charbel later that same day. We got to the airport and proceeded to check in at the do it yourself kiosk. As I was checking it the screen read, "you have automatically been rebooked on the 6:40 pm flight" What??? Well it turns out they had decided to cancel our flight after all as well as the next 3 flights that day. Needless to say we were not too happy thinking that we weren't going to be able to fly out until that night, and we were going to miss half a day at Disneyland! After standing in a long customer service line, we were able to get switched to a Frontier flight for 1 pm. Yay!!! Only 6 hours of waiting in the airport instead of 11! We were happy with that and went on to check in our bags... and wait. Here are some pictures of what those hours consisted of: The kids waited anxiously for hours by this window for our plane to pull up to the gate. There was a lot of celebrating when it finally arrived.

When we got to the airport, we took a cab to our hotel. We stayed at the Paradise Pier Hotel in Downtown Disney. We dropped off our things in our room and then headed over to The Disneyland Hotel of our Goofy's Kitchen Dinner that we had scheduled beforehand. We were so excited that we made it. When we first walked in they had a place set up to take pictures with Pluto. Here's how ours turned out:After we got our pictures taken, they seated us and they we got to fill our plates at the all you can eat buffet. The food wasn't wonderful, but we were just so excited to be there, we didn't care. As we were eating our dinner some of the characters came around to say hello. First was Princess Jasmine

Here is Levi anxiously waiting for Goofy to get to our table. He was so cute and excited to see all the characters. He's at the age where he really thinks they are the real characters that he sees on T.V. Unfortunately the picture that I got with all the kids with Goofy was too blurry to use. During the dinner they got to go up and do a dance with goofy and help him make a "cake". They thought that was great!

Here they are with Minnie

After the characters left we went back to get desert. As I was helping the kids, Brandon called me over. He decided to go hunt down Minnie just so he could get a picture with me and her! LOL They had a pretend sports car that the kids cold climb on right outside the restaurant. They got such a kick out of playing in it. They had no idea of the fun still ahead!When we were done with our dinner, we headed over to Disneyland to try and get a few rides in. It turns out that the fireworks show was just about to start, and everyone was sitting waiting to watch it. We took advantage of the shorter lines and went on Buzz Light Year and Star Tours. Then we went and saw the 3-D show, "Honey we Shrunk the Audience". That was pretty cute. Here is Brandon and the kids sporting their 3-D glasses before the show.

After that we called it a night and headed back to the hotel. That's the end of day one! It was a long day, but we were so grateful that things worked out for us to get to Disneyland in time to still be able to do a few things and enjoy the day.