Disneyland Day 2 & 3

Hope every one's week is going well! Thursdays are my busy days. I usually have Gymboree and Jackson's speech therapy. Today I have a meeting for the Spouse Club's Holiday Bazaar too. It is also Brian's Sentinel Week where families come and play sports and grill out. We shall see how today goes. :) Now back to our wonderful vacation in California. Day 2 started out great. We made it to the park at 8:00 am and were refueled and ready for the day. Disneyland park was decorated for Halloween and it was so cute. There were pumpkins everywhere. When we walked through the gate there were characters all over. Jackson got to see Pluto, Minnie, Goofy, Chip and Dale, and many others all in one place. He chose to go and see goofy and Minnie. When he went up to Goofy he had a huge smile on his face. Goofy played with him for like 5 minutes and the whole time Jackson just giggled. I have pictures but wish I had got it on video.

After visiting with characters we made our way to Buzz's ride and Space Mountain. We walked right on to the Buzz ride and then walked over to Space Mountain for Brian and I to ride. We did the rider swap where I went through and brought back a ticket for Brian and he walked through the exit and got right on. It was great. We then made our way to Toon Town to see Mickey's House and all the other character's houses. There were a few rides and rode those as well. Then more rides in fantasyland and Jackson had a blast. Ella did great too. She rode in the stroller unless we were in lines or on the rides. She took her naps in the stroller too. After Fantasyland we did the single rider for Splash Mountain. This is where you can walk through the exit and get right on because any time they need one rider to fill the ride they take from that line. The single rider option was quicker than rider swap for this ride. All day the lines were pretty short. I don't think we waited more than 30 minutes for each ride until the last ride at the end of our day, the Haunted Mansion. I wasn't sure if we should take Jackson but I really wanted to go on it because it was decorated for Halloween too. It was decorated with stuff from The Nightmare Before Christmas and it didn't disappoint. I'm glad we waited and went on the ride! 

By this time it was about 3 and we decided we hit everything we wanted to see and called it a day. We went back to our time share and ordered dinner from the Cheesecake Factory. We ate dinner in and watched TV. Both kids called it a night by 6 which was good since we still had one more day in Disney. The next morning we woke up and went back to California Adventure to see Bugs life land, and some other few rides. It was all so cute. My favorite ride that day was the Monster's Inc ride. It was so stinking cute! The last thing we did was take Jackson to the Disney Junior Show. Of course Jackson loved it. It was with puppets and it had the characters from Jake and the Neverland Pirates, Little Einsteins, Handy Manny, and of course Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. We finished up around 1 and headed back to the time share to pack up. It was really sad leaving the parks that day because we had so much fun but we had a blast and will go back again some day! After checking out we drove to Carlsbad and stayed the night with Brian's brother Kyle and his fiance Vicki. It was nice to unwind and relax with them that evening. We had a great time in Disneyland but that was only the beginning because the next day the rest of Brian's family flew in and we all stayed in a beautiful house together for 5 days and ended our trip with a wedding. SO next post will be about the rest of our wonderful trip with family! Here are the last pics from Disneyland. :)