Family Trip to Disneyland!!

This past month Brandon had to do an audit for work in Australia. He was scheduled to fly into Los Angeles on October 20th so we decided Aiden, Josh and I would fly and meet him then play in California for a week. We got really great airfares through Allegiant Air, bought our Disneyland tickets and were set to party!! This is a picture of us heading to Disneyland for the first day -- Josh was SO excited!

It was really fun to go to Disneyland during the halloween season. They had pumpkins and halloween decorations everywhere. This is a picture of the halloween display above the main entrance gates.

Aiden had a really fun time riding any ride he was big enough for. While Josh and Brandon rode the bigger rides Aiden and I had a lot of down time. We stopped for a snack on a bench when I took this picture of Aiden. "I'm innocent mom!"

The Haunted Mansion was transformed for the season into the Nightmare Before Christmas Mansion. We rode this ride A LOT since all of us could go on it - and we love Halloween and Christmas!

Another ride that we frequented was Star Tours. I rode it twice with Josh and Brandon rode it probably 8 other times with Josh. Aiden got to ride Buzz Lightyear a lot while Star Tours was being ridden. It is now a 3D ride so Josh and I had some people take a picture of us in our hot glasses before the ride.

Aiden was big enough to ride Autopia so we were car driving maniacs. The problem came when Aiden tried to stand up while driving around the course....we'll have to work on that.

Josh was finally tall enough to go on Grizzle River Rapids; he and Brandon rode it quite a few times. I don't love to be wet so I hung out with Aiden and waited. While we were waiting to get a picture of Brandon and Josh in the raft I took this cute picture of Aiden.

And here are the boys in their river raft.

We headed to Huntington Beach one of the days of our trip. It was supposed to be around 90 degrees in Disneyland (probably the hottest day) so we were excited for a warm beach trip. Ummmmm.....we were quite wrong. It was FREEZING! The boys liked to play in the sand and water anyway but we only lasted about 2 1/2 hours. Next time I'll take our jackets and things will be much more bearable.

We played really hard while at Disneyland. We rarely went back to the hotel for naps therefore the boys were very tired every night. (They sometimes took a short nap while in Disneyland but it obviously didn't cut it). This is how Aiden fell asleep one night. He was just too tired to care.

Josh always likes to knock on the White Rabbit's door. Too bad he is never there to answer.

Brandon thought we would waste important time that should be devoted to rides to stop for pictures with the characters. Aiden and I lucked out to get a picture with Tigger and Winnie the Pooh while Brandon and Josh were riding Splash Mountain.

Another ride that requires 3D glasses is the Toy Mania ride in California Adventure. We were all able to ride together which was really fun. Aren't these boys cute?

We took time to watch the Pixar Pals presentation in California Adventure. Josh was selected with a few other kids to be a "hero" with the Incredibles. He was probably the youngest kid out there but since he is so tall for his age he fit right in. (He is wearing his jacket because his shirt was so wet from Grizzly River Rapids - we took the shirt off to dry!)

He got to shake Mr. Incredible's hand while waiting!

He felt pretty important!

This is one of two pictures with our whole family we had taken on our trip. Pretty cute with halloween Mickey in the background huh?!

While we were at Disneyland they had Mickey's Halloween Party. We bought tickets for the special event and the boys dressed up in their pirate costumes. We went trick or treating and enjoyed more halloween fun. They put out trick or treat paths throughout the park with 3-5 stations per path. That added up to a lot of candy!! Each path had a glowing Mickey ghost at the start which served as a pretty good signal of where to head next.

Josh asked me what I was dressed up as.....I informed him I was the mom. :)

We got a picture of Brandon, Josh and Aiden dressed up by the Mickey pumpkin at the front of Main Street. They were a good looking crew.

After riding the Haunted Mansion (which we conveniently called the Halloween Mansion to avoid any possible scaring) Josh was a big fan of Jack Skellington. We stopped to talk to him and get our picture taken. Josh loved it! Jack was so nice to Josh and said some silly things to him - Josh still talks about how silly and nice Jack was.

On our last morning we had a photographer take our family picture in front of the carousel. She had Josh pose with his muscles - looks pretty strong to me!

This just happens to be the second of two family pictures we had taken during the week. We had a really fun family vacation. Josh is already asking when we can go back!!

When we got home we weighed all of the candy from our trick or treating at Disneyland. Brandon also spread it out and laid by it to show just how much we got. This is a pretty good representation of our 17 pounds of Disneyland candy!! Crazy huh? We could have got more but we got worried we wouldn't be able to get it all home.

We had a great week together as a family visiting Disneyland. It's taken almost a week for us to catch up on sleep - we definitely partied hard!!