Thanksgiving Week, Part Two: Our First Trip to Disneyland!

All of our visitors were gone early Tuesday morning, and then we hit the road on Wednesday for Disneyland! We got there in time to do Downtown Disney that night, and then we hit the parks Thursday-Saturday. Brady hates the car, so he spent a lot of time crying on the way to/from Disneyland...but he was seriously the best baby for the rest of the trip! He either hung out in the carrier people-watching or snoozed on me. He's such an easy, go with the flow baby. We left our hotel room around 8am on both Thursday & Friday, and didn't get back until around 7pm. He was such a trooper!!! And of course, I was super worried about how the nights would go b/c we were all crammed into one small hotel room with a baby who doesn't yet sleep through the night. But I guess we wore Brady out so much at the parks that he slept through the night each night we were there....HALLELUJAH!



Riding the teacups with a snoozing Brady :)

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad!

Dumbo

We had lunch reservations on Thanksgiving Day at Ariel's Grotto. This was much more casual than our princess meals at Disney World when we dined at Akerhuas in Norway at Epcot or Cinderella's Castle in Magic Kingdom, but the girls still enjoyed it! They got to meet Ariel, Tiana, Belle, Rapunzel, and Cinderella at lunch.

Our three little turkeys :)



Day #2 at Disneyland/Family Selfie on the Monorail
At Disney World, we had to ride the Monorail to get around the parks. At Disneyland, everything is so much closer together so we had absolutely NO need to ride it whatsoever. But the girls begged to ride it, so we did. ;)

No one can ever accuse Hadley of being a thrill-seeker. She was perfectly content to sit most rides out and hang with Mommy & Brady.

This ride is very similar to Dumbo. Hadley rode it once with Shelby & Derek, but that was enough for her. ;)

My very favorite part of all of our Disney trips is watching the parades with the girls. It is so fun to see their eyes light up as each float passes by! And eating ice cream while watching the parades is a MUST in our family. ;)  This was our first time ever doing Disney at Christmastime, and it was so fun to see the parade all decked out for Christmas!

 

We were eating dinner one night & there was a high chair right next to us. So I grabbed it just to see if Brady would sit there for a second. He's never been in a high chair before, so I wasn't sure what he'd think of it...he loved it! :)

Enjoying their new souvenirs..princess music boxes!

We watched the Paint the Night parade on Friday night. It was very similar to the Electrical Parade at Disney World but a little more high-tech! We all really enjoyed it!

 

 

Waiting in line for the Ariel ride...Hadley's favorite!!!

Our third & final day at the parks was forecasted to have rain in the afternoon, so we were thinking about cutting our trip a little short and heading home that evening instead of Sunday morning like we had originally planned. This ended up being such a blessing in disguise b/c Hadley wasn't feeling the best, and it helped us avoid the Sunday after Thanksgiving traffic + get a full day at home to unpack, get settled back in, and start our Christmas decorating!! And the best part was the rain didn't roll in until about 2:00, so we were still able to enjoy a pretty full day at the parks before calling it quits!

Every time we've gone to Disney World, we've always been amazed at the volume of kids sacked out in strollers. I'm talking it's 10:30am, and we see kids (not toddlers!) passed out already! It's always seemed crazy to us b/c we just don't have kids who sleep on the go. Well, on our fourth Disney trip as parents...we finally had a sleeping kid in a stroller...and it was only b/c she was a little under the weather! Poor thing was exhausted!!

We had such a good trip, and I'm so glad we went!! It was a different kind of Thanksgiving for sure, but so much fun! I remember thinking Derek was crazy this summer when he started talking about a Thanksgiving trip to Disneyland. At that point, we were majorly sleep deprived and just trying to make it to the next day. Planning, much less taking, a major family vacation seemed like an insurmountable task, but I'm so glad Derek did this for us. Moving cross-country and having a new baby is hard. This trip gave us something to look forward to in those first few hard weeks, and it kept us from feeling woeful about spending our first holiday in Las Vegas on our own.

It was also so fun to get to experience Disneyland after years and years of Disney World vacations. It was crazy to us how much was the same but also how much was different! For instance, the Ariel ride that the girls were obsessed with last year at Magic Kingdom is exactly the same at Disneyland! Many other rides were similar, but with varying nuances--Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Dumbo, and Space Mountain to name a few. One of the biggest differences to us was just the layout. Disney World is its own "thing." When you're at Disney World, it feels like its own world. You're completely isolated from the rest of the world. You pretty much have to stay on property to be anywhere close to the parks. But Disneyland is a completely different story. The off property hotels are closer!!! Craziness! We stayed on property at Disney World and still had to walk a LOT + take Monorail or ride a bus to get to any of the parks. At Disneyland, our off-property hotel was a super short walk to either park or Downtown Disney. That is just UNHEARD of at Disney World and seemed so weird to me!! Main Street seemed strikingly similar to me at both places with the exception that Cinderella's Castle at Disney World has a much bigger wow factor than Aurora's Castle at Disneyland. One last significant difference to this ice cream lover--at Disney World, there were ice cream stands GALORE. Literally, on every corner you could find a stand selling the chocolate Mickey Mouse shaped ice cream or a Mickey ice cream sandwich. I think I saw ONE of those the entire time we were at Disneyland. At first, I thought it was just b/c it was Christmastime and they didn't sell ice cream as much since it was colder, but then I realized there were Churro stands on every corner. So maybe Disneyland does Churros instead of ice cream? It seemed so bizarre to me.

Oh, and one more crazy difference! At Disney World, you're constantly seeing kids/families with matching personalized shirts for their Disney trips. People did that at Disneyland, but they were all silk screen whereas ours were monogrammed. People were CONSTANTLY asking me if I made the girls' shirts, it was the strangest thing. They were all so intrigued by their shirts. Apparently the west coast doesn't do embroidery. ;)  And speaking of things the west coast doesn't do--bows. Before moving to Las Vegas, people would comment on the girls' hair color everywhere we went. Since moving to Vegas, people comment more often on their bows than their hair color. People always ask if I make the bows, which I found so weird until I realized our girls are the only ones out here wearing bows. ;)  This Air Force life is a wild ride, but it has been so fun to experience the culture around the country!

And that's a wrap for Thanksgiving 2016!! It was such a fun week!