Disneyland

Today we took the kids to Disneyland. Most of my family had work or wedding preparations to make and so we thought we would just get the kids out of the way, and have some fun while we were doing that. 😉

Upon walking into Disneyland, and just as we came up on main street, Goofy walked right in front of us:

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Apparently the kids weren’t expecting Goofy to be walking down the street, and thought it was hilarious.

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Lydia, has an obsession with Minnie Mouse, and walking down Main Street she saw Minnie mice EVERYWHERE she looked. Every few seconds she was pointing somewhere else and saying “Mee Mou! Mee Mou!” .

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We decided to start the day in Tomorrow land and the first thing we came up to was Star Tours. Last time the kids came to Disneyland, was before I found out that we were pregnant with Chloe, and Kyle wasn’t with us that time. So last time we were at Disneyland Jeremy and Dinah were too small to go on Star Tours. This time Chloe, Lydia and Adam were too small. So I stayed outside with them while Kyle took the older kids in. The people working Star Tours did give Chloe a coupon to come back and get to the front of the line when she is tall enough to go on it. We’ll see if we can keep that from getting lost. 😛

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Next it was my turn to take the kids on Astro Orbiter while Kyle waited with Lydia and Adam. After that as we walked to see what to do next, the kids spotted some storm troopers and had to have a picture taken:

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By the way, notice that they are all wearing m&m shirts. We all wore our m&m shirts and people thought that was the coolest thing. People that work at Disneyland told us that they see a lot of groups come in wearing similar clothing, but that our idea was pretty original. 😉

The storm troopers had another engagement that they needed to be getting to and so we went on our way as well. Ethan saw something on the map about a Jedi Training show that was supposed to be starting in a few minutes and it was right around the corner from where we were so we decided to check it out. In the show the Jedi and his assistant “used the force” to select a whole bunch of kids from the audience to attend “training”. They put each kid in a jedi robe, and handed them a light saber and then taught them some moves. THEN Darth Vader and Darth Maul and some storm troopers arrived. Each kid had to fight off either Darth Vader or Darth Maul with their newly acquired skills and then they went away.

I took the older kids on Space Mountain. After we were quite a ways through the line Jeremy turned to me and said “I don’t want to go”. I told him that at this point he just has to because Kyle was nowhere near us and I couldn’t just send Jeremy to go find him, and I wasn’t going to get out of line either! There was a single lady in line ahead of us and she offered to ride next to one of the kids so they wouldn’t be alone. So Tyra sat next to her, and Ethan and Dinah sat next to each other, and I sat with Jeremy. Space Mountain was awesome as always, and Jeremy was fine and even admitted that it wasn’t so bad, and we got off the ride and went to see the pictures that it took of our space ship. Pretty much you could see me in the back and the other lady in the front, and you could see the top of Tyra’s head but all the other kids were just gone, “ghost children”. They all had their heads ducked so far down the camera couldn’t see them at all. We went to find Kyle and he had lunch for us, and while we ate he went on Space Mountain.

We then went over to Autopia. We had to split up again, because this time even Ethan was too short to ride by himself. Ethan thought he could do it, but when we got in the car he couldn’t steer and reach the pedal to make it go, at the same time. So I pushed the pedal and I let him steer.

Next we went on a Buzz Lightyear ride. This one is a new one to the park and I don’t think it was much of a keeper. Basically you get in the ride and then you grab a lazer gun that is attached to the ride, and you try to “shoot” all the Zurg symbols through the whole ride. So it was like a moving video game ride. Interesting, but not something I think will be around for very long.

By this time it was starting to get a bit warm and we decided it was perfect time to go to the Tiki Room.

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We didn’t get dole whips while we were there, so we will have to make sure we do that NEXT time we go to Disneyland. After the Tiki Room we went to the Jungle Cruise.

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By this time Kyle’s ankles were feeling sore, and so he stayed on the ground with a sleeping Lydia and Adam, while I took the others through Tarzan’s tree house. I still remember when it was Swiss Family Robinson’s tree house. The kids didn’t really want to stop and look at anything in the tree house. Dinah basically tried to run through the whole thing as fast as she could.

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Kyle wanted to do something to sit down and get out of the heat so next we went on Pirates of the Caribbean. They have changed that ride, which makes me sad. I thought that they had come up with the Pirates movie to kind of go along with the ride, considering they were coming up with other movies that went along with Disneyland rides (Haunted Mansion, Country Bears). But now they seem to have modified the ride to make it go more along with the movie. They added projected scenes of pirates from the movies. It really just makes me sad that they have taken a ride that has been there for as long as I can remember and they are making it lame. We discovered that they did similar things to the Haunted Mansion ride too. 🙁

After Pirates we were in the neighborhood of New Orleans Square and that meant it was time for mint juleps and apple fritters! So we stopped and had snacks. 🙂 There were some older people sitting at a table across from us, and the older lady was very impressed by the size of our family. I think she also liked to look at their cute faces. She sat there looking at our kids and telling us of when her kids were young. She thought it was funny to watch the kids make a mess of the powdered sugar that came on their beignets (donut like things, apparently the Mint Julep bar doesn’t sell apple fritters anymore, just Mickey shaped beignets, and so Kyle had to go to another place to get the fritters).

We spent the late afternoon and evening trying to do as much in Fantasyland as we could, but it was getting harder as they started shutting off areas for fireworks. They seem to be trying to get more and more impressive with their fireworks shows, however I think they tried too hard and it ended up being a pretty lame fireworks show. They had fireworks going off from three different spots, which meant you kept turning your head every which direction so that you could try to see them all. The “music” that they played to go with the fireworks, were basically just sound clips from the various rides. And they had scenes projected onto Small World that I think was supposed to go with it all. Fantasmic was WAY better. At least for that show, you knew that you could stand anywhere facing the water and you would see most of the show and the music was amazing. I remember the show they did when I was a kid. Tinkerbell would fly off the Matterhorn and signal the start of the fireworks. Tonight’s show was just extremely lame to the point that we really lost interest in watching it so we tried to get a few more rides in despite being trapped in a certain area of the park.

Throughout the day we also tried to keep our eyes open for the penny smasher machines. Kyle asked at one of the shops if they knew where all of the machines were and they gave him a map showing what machines were where. Unfortunately, it needs some major updating. The princess smasher wasn’t at the shop by small world like the map said. We couldn’t find a set of the ones it listed in tomorrow land. There weren’t any machines in the penny arcade like the map said. And the Lincoln memorial building had some other machines that weren’t listed as being there. Eventually all the kids found a penny that they wanted and everything was good. By that time though, the park was closed and they were moving everybody out. We went across the way to the Main Street stores and let each of the kids pick a souvenir, and it was time to go back to Grandpa’s house.

The La Brea Tar Pits

It’s been interesting these last few years that we have had kids in school, to see the kinds of field trips they have gone on. I have seen them go on field trips to the zoo, or Ethan once went to Thanksgiving point, they also sometimes have a “walking field trip” to a nearby park. A while ago Jeremy had a field trip to the “CAL Ranch Store”. Tyra has a field trip coming up to go to a planetarium at BYU, and Ethan will be going to Utah lake, and to a natural history museum before this school year is over. Thinking of all these places made Kyle and I reminisce to when we were in elementary school and what kinds of field trips we went on. We both remember field trips that included some tide pools, and we both remember going to the “La Brea Tar Pits”. We went and found some tide pools last time we were in California, so this time we made time for the tar pits!

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We started our visit waiting for the tour to start while the kids tried to lift the metal poles out of some tar:

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The tour began, and we went to follow the guide.

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I thought he seemed like a guy who REALLY likes what he does, and he seemed to know a lot about the different fossils  in the museum. However we soon noticed that most of the kids were getting bored, and the guide just wasn’t moving fast enough to keep their interest, so we had to go on ahead and do our own self guided tour. In this picture I love the look of surprise on Jeremy’s face!

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Tyra wanted to size her arm span up with the mammoth’s tusks:

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That meant that Dinah wanted to size her arm span up with the large bird’s wing span:

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Some of the kids were really interested in watching a real paleontologist working on real fossils in the “Fishbowl lab”.

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Jeremy being silly yet again:

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After we finished looking at everything inside the museum we decided to go out and explore the atrium. It was very pretty with all the plants and the small water fall. I think the kids got a kick out of seeing a whole bunch of turtles.

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When we first walking into the museum, and Kyle was buying tickets, the kids got really excited to find souvenir penny smasher machines. You may remember that when we were in North Carolina they were introduced to this concept, and I had since found penny passports for them to keep their smashed pennies in, and penny smashing machines here at the tar pits meant they got to add a second penny to their collection. So when we were finished checking out the atrium and we were about ready to go, we lined all the kids up on the bench while I tried to figure out how many quarters and how many pennies I had. 😉

I am really glad we were able to make time to visit the La Brea Tar Pits. I think most of the kids really enjoyed it too, of course Lydia and Adam don’t really care very much, but they were pleasant sitting in the stroller and just checking things out.

Changes

After working at Symantec for six years, it felt really strange to say my final goodbyes. I’m not one for sentiment at work, so when I got choked up and had issues responding to people, hopefully they didn’t take offense and think that I was trying to brush them off.

I spent my last day at work trying to catch up on all the cases I had, trying to get through the final points of them so I could feel I did my best before handing them off. I think part of me was also in denial about leaving. When word started getting around that I was leaving, and people started coming over to say goodbye, I accepted that I was really going to leave that day and started packing. I surprised myself with how much I had collected over the years of being there, and had to make a couple trips out to the car with everything. I think a good sign of being trusted at the company was that my manager and his manager both left before I did, so I was practically on my own to leave the building my final time. After I triple-checked I cleaned out as much as possible, I left my badge with a former manager, and left for the last time.

When I got home, Rebecca had a large fruit basket waiting for me. She informed me about it earlier, but didn’t check the card. It turns out Venafi was so excited to have me come on board, they sent this out in welcome. It was a nice distraction from my absentminded thoughts about leaving Symantec.

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How did she do that?

HOW did Lydia happen to flip my desktop sideways???

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It is incredibly difficult to type, or to move the mouse around when the orientation has been flipped.

Kyle figured it out when he got home from work, and it ended up being a simple combination of specific keys being pushed at the same time. So he flipped it back the right way and then went into the settings to turn that command off. 🙂

Signs of Spring

A couple of weeks ago a neighbor shared a picture of one of her kids covered in mud from about the waste down.

Last week Tyra came home in mud looking about the same as the neighbor kid did.

The other day as I was driving to the dentist I noticed some tractors out working in the fields.

At the dentist office, I noticed buds on the bushes around the building.

The backyard is all thawed except by the back fence where it gets no sunshine.

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The front yard is mostly thawed aside from the areas that are in the shade most of the time, and the lawn is squishy.

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There are buds on our trees.

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And Chewy was covered in mud when he wanted to come inside today.

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Yes sir, even though today is bleak and overcast, I do believe that spring really is around the corner. This winter has been so cold that everything has been frozen solid for so long, and now the fact that everything is thawing indicates spring is coming. And for that I will rejoice. 🙂