The Rides!!!

Disneyland is the happiest place on earth ALL year long in my opinion, but it especially was in the second week of September! We started out there on a Monday, and the two parks had SO few people at them! We didn't even need to use many Fast-passes because we walked right onto almost all the rides! Need proof? Here you go:Seriously, signs like that were very common! A lot of them actually said 5 minutes was the wait time, but we still walked right on! It was amazing! The only two rides that were closed while we were there were Small World and the Haunted Mansion. The weather was also great. It was warm enough to go on the water rides and feel refreshed, but not too hot. LOVED it!

I've been going on Disneyland rides for my entire life, and I adore them. I'm not nearly as familiar with the rides at California Adventure, but they were fun!
Here's my guide to the rides: (oh yeah, get excited!)

Ashley's Favorite Rides-
Splash Mountain
Indiana Jones Adventure
Pirates of the Caribbean

Ashley's Least Favorite Rides-
The Teacups (yep, it's the only one I dislike)

The Scariest Ride At Disneyland-
Snow White's Scary Adventures (yes, it's a kid's ride, and YES they call it scary for a reason! When the evil witch came out of the wall right towards my face it startled me so badly that I grabbed onto my friend Stacy's arm and screamed my head off! It was really funny to everyone else, but it freaked me out!!!)

Rides I Rode For the First Time On This Trip-
-Nemo's Submarine Voyage- this one did have a line, but it was worth it because it was a long ride and really cute! I liked it.
-Monster's Inc. at California Adventure- Cute ride, worth riding once.
-Grizzly River Rapids at California Adventure- Totally awesome rapids ride, and got me totally soaked!
-Toy Story Arcade at California Adventure- this one's new, and similar to the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disneyland except it's a LOT more fun! I rode this one a whole bunch of times and kept improving my score. Best-kept secret: Get in the single-rider line! You practically walk right on and bypass the entire line!

Rides I Couldn't Ride Because I'm Pregnant-
Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, the Matterhorn, California Screamin' Coaster, Tower of Terror, Indiana Jones (bummer!)
Those are all fun rides, but really the list of things you can go on while pregnant is so much longer!

Things To Do While Everyone Else Rides Those Rides-
-Eat
-Shop
-People-watch
-Take pictures of things you might not normally see, like this one:

For a much different point of view, here is Kirsten's Guide to the Rides, or Rides From the Perspective of a 15 month-old:

Kirsten's Least Favorites Rides-
Almost all of them. :) I'm sure it's different for every kid, but she really didn't like many of the rides. I thought she would love Dumbo (what kid doesn't?) but she got really scared and cried most of the time. She just hated the wind blowing so fast in her face.

She also cried through Peter Pan (my favorite kid ride!), so I knew the rest of the Fantasy Land rides would be disasters. She tolerated the Winnie the Pooh ride okay, but at that point I figured we'd just stop trying the rides for now.

Kirsten's Favorite Rides (otherwise known as the Only Rides She Liked):
-Heimlich's slow-moving little Bug's Life ride in California Adventure. It was really cute and moved so slowly she couldn't help but like it! The whole Bug's Life land was adorable and meant for really young kids.

-The Spinning Ladybug ride in the Bug's Life land. It was like a slower, smaller version of the teacups, and she did okay on it.

-The Jungle Cruise! We finally found a whole-family ride that she enjoyed! It moved so slowly and she liked seeing all the "animals" off the sides of the boat. I'm sure she would have liked Small World as well, but it was closed.

My parents emailed me this picture of them from Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters. I thought it was pretty funny, and I'm sure anyone who knows my parents will enjoy this too!

The Disneyland rides are so awesome! Hopefully Kirsten will think so too the next time we take her there. We had such a great time on them!

Disneyland Characters!!!

My Disneyland pictures will take up several different posts, so this is most definitely not all! But these are all the cute pictures we got with the Disney characters. This was pretty much the main reason I wanted to take Kirsten to Disneyland with us at such a young age. . . to get fun pictures like these!
I love these pictures we got with Winnie the Pooh! Kirsten wasn't scared of any of the characters at all, which surprised me! She just wanted to touch all of them and thought they were fascinating.

We also found Eeyore for a picture!

I really wanted to get a picture of Kirsten with Tigger, but Kirsten was with my parents and not with us when Tigger showed up. We were WET in this picture because we had just gotten off Splash Mountain! I LOVE that ride!

My parents did manage to find Minnie and Mickey though! I'm so glad!!!

She just loved their big noses. :)

This last one is in California Adventure.

Stay tuned for lots more pictures and info about our Disneyland trip. It was SO awesome! And I'm really happy we got such cute pictures with the characters!

5 Fall Things I'm Loving This Week!

1. Halloween Oreos! I look forward to these babies every year! For some reason I had a really difficult time finding them this year so I was thrilled to finally find them at Target. Even though they say they taste the same as regular Oreos, they're somehow better. I don't know why, but they are!
2. The cold, crisp air outside! All you have to do is step outside, breathe in, and you instantly know it's FALL! I love this time of year so much!

3. Halloween Kit-Kats! Another treat I look forward to every year! They're white chocolate ones dyed orange and I just think they are so yummy I've been eating at least two every day. It's dangerous to keep these things in a bowl on your end table, let me tell you!

4. My new favorite Halloween decoration that I bought at Disneyland. . . isn't it the cutest thing ever? I fell in love the second I saw it! There's a cool little flicker light that goes inside it too, but I still need to buy batteries for it. There's just nothing cuter than a Mickey-shaped pumpkin!

5. The scent of the pumpkin spice candles I've been burning in the house at night. They get me right into the FALL mood in two seconds! I don't even like pumpkin pie or eating pumpkin things in particular, but I sure love the smell!

Crazy Dreams!!!

A couple of nights ago, I dreamed that I had a baby boy. I woke up and thought, "Well, at least I actually had a HUMAN baby this time!" When I was pregnant with Kirsten, I had a very vivid dream one night that instead of a baby I had a litter of kittens! And the weirdest thing about it was that nobody else in the dream thought it was weird!

I typically remember lots of my dreams and I have all KINDS of crazy ones about people I haven't thought about in years or people I've never even met before. My dreams get even stranger when I'm pregnant though! For some reason, lots of my pregnancy dreams involve swimming in the water with whales or fish or just being in the water somehow. Any dream interpreters reading this? :)

The San Diego Zoo!

I grew up going to this Zoo, and it really is the best in the world! So of course we had to take Kirsten for her first trip to the San Diego Zoo. Before we left Seattle we bought this awesome thing from Costco called the Southern California City Pass. For $220 each, we got 3-day hopper passes to Disneyland and California Adventure, 1 day at Universal Studios, 1 day at Sea World, and 1 day at the San Diego Zoo. It was an amazing deal! And one very busy week. :)

Had to get a picture sitting on the hippo!

I love tons of animals at the Zoo, but my favorites we saw would have to be the cute, cuddly pandas. I want to hold and hug a baby panda so badly! They were totally adorable, and there are so few places in the world where you can see them!

Cute little panda in the background.

The baby panda was up in the trees chowing down on some bamboo!

The San Diego Zoo is SO green and lush. They spend a fortune on all the tropical plants they have there, and it shows!

Our passes also included a ride on the Zoo tram that took us all around the Zoo. It was a really cool way to see lots of the animals, even though Kirsten got a little restless towards the end. My parents didn't go to the Zoo with us, but that's our friend Oscar in the picture with us.

Aren't meerkats just sooooo cute? Little Timons!

We saw some cool giraffes from the tram.

The tiger was sleeping, but we got a nice close view of him! Gorgeous!

The smelliest animal at the Zoo? Got to be the flamingos! Kirsten really liked them though.

I thought the pose this otter did for the camera was hilarious!

This parrot looked just like the royalty of the jungle to me.

We did see lots of sleeping animals, since we were there in the afternoon. But the polar bears were still really cute!

Stacy and me with the polar bear statues.

Kirsten did a great job in her stroller all afternoon! We had a really fun time at the San Diego Zoo, and hopefully other animal lovers like me will enjoy this post. :)

Down On Grandpa's Farm!

At looooooong last, I finally got some pictures on here! There are tons more, but I won't attempt them until those annoying issues are worked out. Anyway, here are the first of the vacation pictures! Otherwise known as "The daily life of Kirsten on Grandpa's Farm!"

My parents don't really live on an actual working farm. But to many people it seems like a farm, because their house is on five acres of land. They have a vegetable garden, a whole bunch of fruit trees, a big chicken coop with chickens and turkeys, one dog, five cats, and a tractor. As my friends used to say, I lived "out in the boonies." Doesn't it sound funny to say we visited my parents' farm in San Diego? But it's true, all of that is located only a 45 minute drive north of downtown San Diego!

As you can imagine, Kirsten had the time of her life playing and exploring outside! She woke up with the sun (and I do mean with the sun! At home she normally sleeps until 8:00 or so, but her room in San Diego was a ton brighter and warmer so she got up closer to 6!) and was always ready to play! Thankfully, my mom let me sleep longer and she took Kirsten outside to play with all the animals. Kirsten LOVED the chickens especially! Chickens are the first animal that Kirsten has made the animal noise for! Lots of times a day she would stand by the back door and say "Bop-bop-bop" so we always knew she wanted to go outside and see the chickens. :)

Kirsten and Grandpa had a great time feeding the chickens together. She always laughed whenever she saw them. I guess to her chickens must look like the funniest things ever!

I'm glad my parents loved taking her to see the chickens outside, because I have a weird confession to make now. . . I'm sort of afraid of chickens. Not like AFRAID afraid, like I am with spiders or horror movies. But I just prefer to see chickens from a distance, rather than have them pecking around my feet. I'd rather just eat chickens than be around them. Crazy, I know! So Kirsten seemed pretty brave to me!

Another of Kirsten's favorite things to do outside was go up and down the stairs by our patio. She never seems to tire of climbing things, and stairs are her favorite!

She loved my parents' dog, Millie. I was happy to see that she wasn't afraid of her! In fact, I think the only new word she learned how to say on that trip was "Millie." Except it sounded more like "Mell."

One of the cats got in that shot too! It's a pretty good farm, isn't it?

Kirsten misses Millie, now that we're home.

My mom put this scarecrow hat on her, and Kirsten actually enjoyed wearing it. So she fit right in on the farm!

Kirsten misses all the animals and having a huge, fun backyard to go play in. I miss that too! But most of all, I miss being able to sleep in while Kirsten played with Grandma. Sleeping in is pure bliss!

Frustrated!!!!

To everyone who's been wondering why I haven't gotten any vacation pictures up here yet. . . I have been TRYING!!! I just spent Kirsten's entire nap trying to upload pictures onto my blog and they refuse to upload! It takes a million years while the loading page continues to say "Your images are being uploaded to blogger." So I wait. . . and wait. . . and lament the loss of the precious nap time. And then after waiting for all that, I get nothing!!! No pictures, no images, just nothing. This same thing was happening yesterday, so for now I give up! Please be patient, everyone. I am trying my best to get pictures up! But for some reason Blogger hates me right now and refuses to let me.