The Happiest Place on Earth (and Disneyland, too!)

OK, I totally stole my title from Vanessa, but it's so true! We just loved being in Southern California - the gorgeous weather, the vast array of stores and restaurants that we don't have here, all the flowers and trees and grass are gorgeous and green, even in February, and, of course, we loved spending a couple of days with family and 5 days at Disneyland. I did an informal poll of the family, and here are everybody's "Top 5" lists from our trip:

Adam:
1. The hotel elevator. It was one of those glass elevators, and it went 11 stories up and overlooked the atrium in the hotel. He could have ridden this all day and been perfectly happy.

2. The hotel pool. I think Adam only got to go swimming once, since he was napping the other times when we took Audrey, but he really, really loved it. He's such a water baby.

3. His acting debut - he was chosen to be the handsome prince while we were listening to Princess Aurora tell her story. His cameo was during the scene in the forest, when Aurora meets a handsome stranger and dances with him. Their encounter ended with a hug.
4. The food. He begged and begged for this popcorn, but it was lunchtime, and Jared wanted him to eat something more substantial first. He cried when we told him we were going to get lunch and passed by the popcorn stand, then he fell asleep on our way to get lunch. When he woke up, the first thing he asked for was popcorn so, after he had a yogurt and a couple of chicken nuggets, we got him the giant bucket of popcorn. He carried it around all evening - he loved that thing!
He also loved the giant sucker he got from the candy shop we went in while we were waiting for the parade to start (that was an exercise in patience - taking 2 wired kids into a packed candy shop and trying to keep track of them, make sure they didn't break anything, etc.) He made a HUGE mess with it though.

5. The souvenir shops. He loved looking at all the different toys and things they had for sale. He especially loved this Pluto robot that you could make walk and the spinny-light-up-wand kind of things. He sought those out in pretty much every store we visited, and never wanted to leave.
Honorable mention goes to the areas where he could run around and play (Toontown - especially Donald's boat and Mickey's house, the Tarzan Treehouse, the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail at California Adventure) without having to wait in line, but I was a bit nervous with all the people that were around and still kept a fairly tight leash on him (not literally, though I would've liked one!). I could just totally envision him darting off and us having to scour Disneyland for our 2 year old! Thanks to constant hand-holding and stroller-riding, that didn't happen, but I know he would have been happier if he'd been able to have free reign to run around and do whatever he wanted.


You may notice a few things are conspicuously absent from Adam's list - what about the rides? He wasn't all that impressed with the rides, and was even less impressed that he had to stand in line for them. There were a couple of rides he liked (Peter Pan, where he yelled out "I'm flying! In Outer Space!", Tea Cups, Nemo, and Buzz Lightyear are the ones I can think of offhand), but really, I think he would have been perfectly happy at the hotel or in a toy store all week. Good thing his ticket was free! ;)

I know I said I was going to post everybody's list, but this took forever (not to mention there's something funky going on with uploading photos - it was really slow, and now it's not working at all), so I'll be back with everybody else's list soon!