Disneyland--day 1

We decided to take our kids to Disneyland and California Adventure in October. Our good friends the Fetzers had planned a family trip, and it sounded like so much fun that we decided to crash their party! They were kind enough to let us tag along, and we really had a lot of fun together.

No one in our family had been to California Adventure before, and we went there on the first day. The grin on Chad's face that morning made me think that he might be even more excited than the kids were! The park was decorated for Halloween, and the first area that we went to was covered in candy corns.

Right away we saw Minnie Mouse, and the kids were thrilled. We even beat out most of the crowd, and we didn't have to wait very long for a picture with her!

We also saw Chip (or is it Dale?) and Goofy.

We went on a few rides and explored a little bit, and then we found Snow White.
Sully was hanging out right across the street.

Everyone loved the Monster's Inc. ride!

We also saw Handy Manny, which really made Andrew's day. We looked for his tools, but they were nowhere to be found.

The kids all liked Pluto, but when we found Mr. Incredible Andrew decided to stay in the stroller. I guess he is a little bit intimidating!


Mater and Lightning McQueen were Andrew's favorites. He even had his Lightning shirt and shoes on that day.

Sarah and Savannah went on the "Jumping Jellyfish" ride and loved it.

This is the whole family standing by one of the waterfalls. Only Sarah and I were brave enough to go on this ride, and we got totally soaked. We spent the rest of the day drying off.

Other highlights of our first day included the "California Screaming" roller coaster (only Chad and I braved that one!), "Soaring over California", the Toy Story ride, and the huge Mickey Mouse ferris wheel. On some of the bigger rides we took turns watching the Fetzers kids, and then they would watch ours. They have 5 kids, including a set of 7-month-old twins, so you can imagine that we got some pretty good looks when we had all 9 kids! We had a great day, and it was the perfect start to a really fun vacation.