Disneyland and Beyond

Last week we went on a family vacation to Southern California. We went to Disneyland, the San Diego Zoo, and Sea World. It was a fun trip, although Paul and I may need to go on vacation to recover! I have great memories of Disneyland. We went a couple of times when I was young and it was always so much fun. My family would sometimes wear matching shirts.
Here we are in matching BYU sweatshirts- I was about 15. We are in the line for the newly opened Star Tours (you can barely see me looking thrilled in the back- I was thrilled- but I was also 15!). I remember that after waiting 1.5 hours (ahh, the days of Disneyland without fast pass!), the ride made me violently sick. The memory is strong enough that I "let" Paul take the kids on Star Tours while I waited with the baby;-)Following tradition, I found matching shirts for our children. I quickly discovered that even at Disneyland 6 children stand out. Furthermore, 6 children in matching shirts really stand out! However, it was easy to keep track of the children and I figured that if someone got lost we would know exactly what they were wearing (luckily we didn't need to test this theory!). This is a picture I took of the children waiting to leave the hotel in the morning. They are watching TV- can you tell?! The title for the picture is "One of these things is not like the other" (click on the picture and you will understand why!).

We let Joseph carry the camera for most of the Zoo and Sea World. We ended up with a lot of pictures of animals. However, the pictures were not of zoo animals; we now have 527 pictures of every duck and sparrow living in the San Diego zoo;-)This is Shamu. Hi Shamu. Joseph did not zoom in to take this picture because we were sitting very, very, very close to Shamu. Paul saved us good seats for the show. We got wet. Very, very, very wet. And by the way, in case you have forgotten like we did, Orca live in the ocean- the water is cold and salty;-) I don't think any of our children will ever forget the experience, although some of them may need to attend therapy later in life!We decided to visit Sequoia National Park on the way home. After visiting Disneyland with 5 million other people, it was good to get back to nature and do some tree hugging- literally.
Just as a note, the man in blue was more intrigued by our family than the tree. Another man was so intrigued that he felt the need to take a picture of our family (you can see the camera on the right side of the picture)!
This is Adrie minutes after she threw up on our drive down the mountain from visiting the Sequoias. She and Katie are proving once again that 9/10 children are perfectly happy playing in a pile of dirt.