Brooklyn's Blog: 5 Days in California

For our 10th anniversary (January 19th), and to get us all out of town and away from life for a few days, we headed to the happiest place on earth, Disneyland! We didn’t tell Brooklyn anything at all about our trip. She started off just knowing we were going for a ride with Aunt Elaine and that she got to ride in her stroller. Then we got to the airport and told her we were going on a plane ride. On the plane we told her we were going to stay in a hotel for a few nights.

I’ll warn you all now, we took about 1,000 pictures so there will be a lot of them in the posts for our trip. We flew out on leap day, February 29th. We got on our plane on time, but ended up sitting on it for an hour waiting in line to get de-iced and the de-icing itself. It was snowing when we left Utah, a lot. We flew to the Long Beach airport, we’ve never been there before, it’s tiny for anyone who hasn’t been there. So tiny that you go down ramps from the plane, outside and then walk inside the airport.

You can’t see much as it was dark when we got there, but this is Brooklyn is outside the airplane, where it was loud, you can see the lights from the plane though.

After picking up our luggage and rental car we headed to our hotel which was just over 1/2 mile from the park. What we didn’t know is that every leap day Disneyland is open for 24 hours, the entire leap day. We wouldn’t have noticed, or even cared except for the fact that it took us an hour or so to drive in front of Disneyland to get to our hotel.

Day 1

We got up and got dressed for the day, not telling Brooklyn where we were going. We headed to Disneyland still not telling her anything. We got in line to get into the park…then finally told her where we were. She had no idea what Disneyland was. I had to tell her that it’s where the princesses live, and Mickey and Minnie to get her excited, and she was so excited then!

After getting into the park we found out that one of Mommy’s favorite shows was filming there. We didn’t stick around to try and find any of the stars, but got a picture in front of the sign that blocked off their area.

After a picture with our first Disneyland helper We headed to Breakfast with Minnie and Friends. We met so many characters there. Brooklyn’s first was Capitan Hook. She loved meeting him! He was our first autograph in our first book. We met lots of different characters. Minnie Mouse and Eeyore.

Cinderella’s fabulous Fairy Godmother.And Piglet to name just a few.Brooklyn’s very first ride was this spaceship thing with Daddy. She loved it!Brooklyn and Daddy in front of Small World. We didn’t ride on it until day two when the line was shorter.We stood in line and met the one and only Mickey Mouse in his very own house, and Pluto too!Brooklyn loved the tea cup ride with Daddy, even though he spun that cup super fast. The ride made Daddy sick, but Brooklyn could have gone again and again.