Doing Disneyland

A celebration of Lydia’s first birthday.

Lydia was turning one.

First birthdays are significant. They are a notable milestone. They are a time that you want to have family around. Since we were unable to make that happen, we wanted to do something special for our kids to commemorate the event. So, we had a pre-birthday event where we videoed in our Alabama-based parents and brothers (and even our California-based brothers), allowed Lydia to open a couple of presents and, as we were doing that, we (oh, by the way) told the kids that we were taking them to Disneyland to celebrate. As you can imagine, they were pretty excited.

The boys “help” Lydia open her birthday gifts.

The only big challenge remaining was surviving a seven hour trip (including traffic in LA) down the I-5 in California. Piece of cake.

The trip went surprising well for a 364-day year old. It did get a bit touchy in traffic, but both Katy and I considered it as success #1.

Lydia’s Birthday

We celebrated Lydia’s (actual) birthday in style … with a breakfast that included all the Disney characters. She enjoyed the visuals and interaction and seemed very comfortable around all these strange new creatures. We also proved that feature of character-people isn’t an inherited trait. We’ll count this as success #2.

Katy’s Birthday

However, Lydia’s birthday was not the only birthday that we could celebrate. The next day, it was Katy’s turn. She chose something a bit more upscale, selecting the Carthay Circle Restaurant at the new(ish) area of California Adventure.

Katy hopped out to capture a quick picture of the dinner scene that night.

When you eat at a nice establishment with four children that have been dragged around a theme park all day, you certainly take a deep breath and pretend to not see the nervous looks of your waiter. This is, after all, Disneyland. A place for kids, regardless of if the table is hosting chicken fingers or fine wine and filet mignon.

The dinner was great and the kids, minus a few shrieks from Lydia, understood that it was mommy’s birthday and acted accordingly. Success #3.

After dinner, we rode a few more rides and then found our places to watch World of Color.

Ah, high-quality camera phones taking shots at night.

The Rain

So, day three of our adventure and, for the most part, we had been avoiding rain. Surprisingly, Los Angeles decided that admist their drought, they would use our vacation as a good time to make up for it. Thankfully, most of the rain had come overnight … and wow did it ever. Intense Pacific storms are intense.

But, Friday was the day that our luck ran out. We dodged the best we could, but the rain and the wind were persistant. Still, we made the best of it and did inside-things with the rain was worst. Overall, we still had a lot of fun.

The boys found a XBox One loaded with a Marvel Lego game to try out during a rain storm.

Heading Back

While lots of fun was had, all good things must come to an end. So we packed the car on Saturday (still raining) and then made one more stop … the Lego Store.

The boys had been saving their money for a while now and after successfully (success #4) holding them off from purchasing anything Lego-related until now, we finally released them upon the mecca of plastic. It didn’t take them long to make their purchases.

Forced pose after spending their saved money in the Lego store at Downtown Disney.

After that, we braved the LA traffic again to head north. Apparently, San Francisco was where the sun was.

Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

It was a really solid trip and I am glad that we have this set of memories to associate with Lydia hitting such a special milestone.