California Trip - still to come

Sorry I have not had time to post anything else. I know you all are dying for pictures so I will post a few and write more later. These are of Noelle from her Princess Lunch where she got to meet the princess and get pictures and autographs. She LOVED it!!!! Well worth the $20 for a hot dog and mac and chesse for her and $30 fish and chips for me. Since Noelle was dressed up as Aurura (sleeping Beauty) she got some more attention from her and they twirled their dresses together! What more could a little princess want?

California Trip - Day 2-4

I forgot to add this picture at the end of yesterday. Wyatt was kind of tired. :) He is not quite big enough for a booster but we took it on our trip for easier portability. Sorry about that neck, kiddo.

Disneyland and California Adventure
First off, I must say, I do not recommend visiting these two parks without a minimum of 5 days. Squeezing it all in with 14 people in 2 and a half days was CRAZY!!!
Since most of you are familiar with Disneyland I won't go into details about what we did. We waited in lots of lines and paid too much for food and got the kids and backpacks and water and sunscreen ect, in and out of the stroller 15 times a day.
But we had a great time. The kids LOVED all the rides they went on, even if they were temporarily scared (ie. Pirates of the Caribbean) Noelle went on roller coasters and lots of rides I thought she might be scared on but she loved them. She really enjoyed the Soaring over California ride where you sit in a seat and they raise all the rows up to be looking over a big screen and they play a movie like you are flying over California. They use wind and the seats move to make it really feel like you are flying. Noelle's eye were wide the whole time and she loved it! It was really fun to see the kids enjoy all of the rides so much. Wyatt was unable to do a few more things and I was disappointed because I think he would have enjoyed the bigger rides even more than Noelle. He did get scared at the 3-D shows and kept a grip on my arm the whole time. They also really enjoyed meeting all the characters and getting pictures with them.

Well I decided to just make a web album instead of loading all the pictures on my page.
so you can find the album here.
I took hardly any pictures because we were rushing through there pretty fast day to day and there was all the juggling of the babies and miscellaneous things, I couldn't balance pulling out a camera all the time. I never did get a family picture of the 5 of us which is a bummer. But we did take a lot of video so we will have that to go back and look at too.

California Trip - Day 1

So our first day started out waking up at 4 am to catch our 6:50 flight. We dressed the kids in their clothes the night before and carried them out to the car but they inevitably woke up at the airport. Things went very smoothly getting through the airport, on the plane and out of the airport. We rented 2 Toyota Sienna minivans (which I am now in love with by the way) and headed out to our first stop at Knott's Berry Farm.
It was hot hot hot!!! After leaving our lame weather around here lately, 93 degrees was a bit of an adjustment. We were hot, tired and overwhelmed at the park for a while and once we got the lay of the land we were just hot and tired. There were lots of rides for the kids and they had a great time. Wyatt and Noelle loved all the rides, especially the car ones. I had to go on most of the rides with Wyatt and it was really fun to see him get all excited and do his cackle laugh of glee.




For dinner we ate at the Fried Chicken Restaurant (don't remember the name) which was delicious. Definately a highlight of the day. Mostly because it was somewhat air conditioned and we arrived at our table with large glasses of ice water waiting for us. We downed those in about a minute. We stayed at the park until around 9pm. Then went to our hotel and crashed.

Off to Disneyland!

Sunday morning we are off to Southern California for a vacation with Ben's family. There will be 14 of us all together! 6 kids and 8 adults. Our itinerary includes Knott's Berry Farm, Disneyland, California Adventure, a Water park, Sea World, a wild animal safari park and the San Diego beach. We like to make the most out of our vacations!:)
So don't bother checking my blog for the next week, or probably for a few weeks. It may take me a while to recover. But then I will post all the stunning pictures of our kids having a blast. We might even have fun too. ;)

Curious, like Curious George!

We are a big fan of Curious George in this house. It is a very cute show but George is always doing things that kids should never be doing. (Like going everywhere by himself! Has anyone else noticed the lack of parental supervision in cartoons? Kids roaming all over the city or country or DragonLand, totally unsupervised?!) They even have a little disclaimer at the end of the show - Some kids in a classroom drawing pictures of George and the funny things he does, then they say, "George is a monkey and he can do things we can't do." Anyway, in one of the episodes, George uses two toy cars as roller skates. So this is what I found Wyatt trying to do this morning. He realized after a few steps that it didn't really work and his feet were a little too big for the little matchbox cars. Lesson learned. He is not a monkey.

Father's Day

For Father's Day I didn't feel like wasting money on token presents so I thought of the idea to buy something for Ben that would encourage spending time with the kids.
Noelle bought him a flour sifter. Since he has taken up cooking, he is interested in having all the gadgets and we hadn't bought a sifter yet so I bought that to represent Noelle being able to spend time with him cooking. So we bought pizza fixing and the kids helped make pizza for dinner.
After dinner, we went outside to play with the ball Wyatt bought for him. The kids are sorely behind on their ball skills and I wanted to encourage some fatherly sports training. The kids had a great time playing with Daddy.

more kiddie conversations

"When I grow up I am going to let my kids do whatever they want but not mean things."
"I am going to let them have snacks whenever they want but not too much."
These are a few of Noelle's thoughts on childrearing. We had a long conversation about parenting in the car the other day. She also said if her kids didn't clean their rooms they would get 10 spankings. I tried to apply that to her but she said it only applied to her kids, not mine.

Oh, something else Noelle always says which I find hilarious is that she says "I'm just so frustrating!!!" when she isn't getting her way about something (she really means "I am frustrated." obviously ) and I usually reply with "Yes, you are frustrating."

Noelle also got a new 'do for the summer.

I can sit up!

Well Logan can sit up at 5 1/2 months. Yeah!!! I love to be able to sit him down places. And he looks super cute.

I took about a couple dozen pictures trying to get him to smile. Most of the time he was too interested in the grass to look up. Eventually Noelle got him to smile but only for a few pictures.

kiddie conversations

Conversation I just had with Wyatt...
Me sitting on the potty, helping Wyatt put on his jammies (when else am I going to get a chance to pee?)
Wyatt: (rubbing my bra) I like this Mommy.
me: Oh really? Why is that?
Wyatt: It keeps your milk from spilling.

Oak Harbor trip

Rebecca's recent blog post reminded me about our trip to Oak Harbor and the pictures I took of Noelle driving her cousin's Jeep. She, of course, was very hesitant and got frustrated quickly when she didn't get the hang of it right away. I kept encouraging her and basically forced her to keep driving around the neighborhood until she got it. She did and had a blast after she got the hang of it. It was a good lesson in perserverance and practice. It is a lesson Noelle is going to need repeated frequently throughout the years as she tends to give up easily.


Her older cousin Davis had a small quad that went much faster than the Jeep and she really enjoyed riding on that with him also.









We had a great weekend hanging out with our family up there. We took a trip to a Fort Casey on the island and had a great time walking around the military batteries dug into the hillside and enjoying the scenary. There were many blue herons, deer, bunnies and other wildlife. I had forgotten my camera and missed out on tons of great pictures. I was very bummed. We also saw some cruise ships going by on the way to dock in Seattle and realized that one of them was the Norwegian Star, the exact ship we took our cruise to Alaska on. We were all very wistful and wishing we were back on that wonderful boat. We have all vowed to take a cruise again sometime, without our children however.


After church we went to Coupeville for pizza and ice cream from a cute boardwalk store. We love visiting Whidbey Island and are so glad we have relatives there to show us around. The scenery is beautiful and there is so much to do. I highly recommend it for vacations.