back blogging

Since we have been gone for 2 weeks, I have posted a lot of new posts going back through the title of Saturday, October 18th. You will have to click to "older posts" link at the bottom of the page to see them all.

Grandfriend's Day

Yesterday was Grandfriend's Day at preschool. All the kids got up front and sang some songs. It was very cute.After they sang that got to do a Thanksgiving craft and have a snack with their Grandfriends.
It is a tradition to take a picture of Marc, Grandma, Great Grandma, and his teachers all together. Here is the picture with Mrs. Street and Mrs. Richardson.
Mrs. Street insisted on taking a picture of Marc, Grandma, Great Grandma, and Me.

Saturday, November 1st

Today is our last day in LA so we tried to get lots of things done. We didn't get as much as we wanted, but we got some of them. We started out by going to another farmer's market and a mall. It was a really nice farmer's market and mall. One of the stores was an American Girl store. I have heard about them, but I had no idea that a store for a doll could be that big! My mom has told me that once Samantha was old enough, she is going to buy her an American Girl doll. We went in to look at the Samantha doll. We decided to get one of the dolls that looks like her when she is old enough.

After the mall we went to the LaBrea Tar Pits. This is a museum that sits on top of a bubbling tar pit.When the tar pit was originally found, there were millions of bones of various animals stuck in the mud. There was a hands-on exhibit that we could try to lift a pole stuck in tar to help us understand why so many animals got stuck and died.The museum has lots of skeletons for the various animals that were found in the tar there.
After we left the tar pits we went to an area of downtown LA called the Toy District. This is an area where all of the little "shops" had toys for sale for very cheap. We wandered for awhile until we wandered into a neighborhood that made us very uncomfortable. We all got a little bit of a wake-up call while in downtown LA. There were a lot of homeless people. A lot of the population is Hispanic. I learned what it felt like to be in a minority.

All in all we had a great time. 2 weeks is a long time to be gone, so we were glad to be home. We had great weather while we were there. It was in the 80's & 90's with no rain until the afternoon before we left. You can look at a lot more pictures of the vacation on our pictures website pictures.stoufer.com

Friday, October 31st

We went on a tour of the LA area today. Our tour bus was a double decker bus, and we sat on the top level. It was really fun.We went to Rodeo Drive. I had to go into one of the shops. We went into Ralph Lauren (which Marc said was "discount" on Rodeo Drive). The cheapest thing we found was a baby girl dress on sale for $250! I told him that if we went into the "discount" store, I didn't want to go into a "full price" store! We did end up eating lunch on Rodeo Drive. We paid $93 +tip for lunch! We had a club sandwich, chicken breast, soup, french fries, and 4 drinks. I guess we were paying for the experience of eating on Rodeo Drive. No matter how hard we looked, we didn't see any celebraties. :(

Thursday, October 30th

Marc's conference ended at 12:00 today so we hung out around the hotel until Daddy got back. When he got back we headed to Hollywood Boulevard. This is definitely and interesting place! There were street performers everywhere. There were also people dressed up in character costumers (Tigger, Dora, Barney, etc.) trying to get you to take a photo of your child with them. After taking the photo, they tell you that you owe them money now. (We didn't expeience it but Marc read about it online before we left and we saw it happen to one person). After we made our way past all the weirdos we found Grauman's Chinese Theater. On the ground outside this are all the hand and foot prints from the stars. We saw many of the them. Marc put his hands in Harry Potter's hand prints......and his feet in Donald Duck's foot prints.After we looked at the handprints we started looking at all the stars on the Hollywood walk of Fame. We found Mickey Mouse's star.
We went to see High School Musical III in the El Capitan theater. It was Samantha's first movie!
Next door to the El Capitan theater is a Disney Soda Fountain. Outside is a staue of Mickey Mouse. It makes a great picture!

Wednesday, October 29th

We didn't do much of anything today. We didn't get home until midnight last night from the Universal party. so we slept in and chilled around the hotel. We did go down to their local farmer's market. They had soooooo many booths with freshly grown produce, just about everything you could thin of. We wished we would have gone there earlier in the trip so we would have had time to buy and eat some of the homegrown produce.

Tuesday, October 28th

We went to the zoo today. I use the word "went" loosely. We got there and it was soooo hot. I think the high was 95 degrees today. As many of you have probably noticed, zoos always seem hotter than outside the zoo. The zoo was also built at the base of a mountain, so it was very hilly. It was really hard pushing a stroller up all the hills. We were there for about 2 hours and we left. The one bright spot of the day was the view we saw as we walked up to the front gate of the zoo.
Marc's conference was a Microsoft conference. Microsoft reserved Universal Studios for the night. Marc got to for free, but we had to pay for me. All the rides were open, the restaurants were free, open bar was free, and a midway games area was free. It would have been a great night except it was there Halloween fight party. All the streets were dark (nighttime) with fog machines making it hard to see anything. Then, when you were least expecting it, someone dressed like they were from a horror movie, would come up behind you and scare the crap out of you. I wa in tears times and scremed a countless number of times. marc was by protector! He actaully ended up hitting one of the guys. He was lunging towards me and Marc put his arm up to protect me and the guy ended up hitting Marc's arm. If you can scared easily, this is not the party for you. I was terrified! One of the workers told us that the "scarers" usually go for the women (easier prey). Since Marc's conference was a computer developer conference, women were far a few between so we got all the "scarers" on us....lucky us!!

Monday, October 27th

Before we left the hotel Marc did some homework for preschool.We went to the Science Museum today. When we first got there there were A LOT of kids there from school field trips. So we went and ate lunch first. Can you guess where we ate?After lunch Marc got to make some slime.Marc got to dress up like an astronaut and "fly" a space shuttle in the room for the younger kids to explore science.Marc enjoyed talking to me through this huge pipe.

As we left the science museum we found a rose garden that had a pretty fountain in the middle of it. It was a perfect photo opportunity.

Sunday, October 26th

Marc (Daddy) started his conference today so me, the kids, and Grandma went to the Children's Museum today. We had a coupon for a free child with the purchase of an adult ticket, and their policy is that Grandparent's are free with a Grandchild. So all 3 of us got in for $8!! It was a small museum, but it was alot of fun. Marc enjoyed playing in the airplane.He also enjoyed playing with the water table. He was trying to make a "trap" for a rubber duckie. He also was trying toblock all the water from flowing down to the bottom of the table. (It didn't work).
They also had an ambulance for the kids to go through and puch lots of buttons. (Marc found all of them I think!) They also had some doctor dress up clothes. Paging Dr. Marc!I think the place we spent the longest was the restaurant. He enjoyed serving Grandma, Me, and Samantha food. He also liked taking our money and ringing our bills up on the cash register (more buttons. ;) ).

Saturday, October 25th

We spent today wandering around Santa Monica. This area is beautiful!!We got to put or feet in the pacific ocean. The water was really cold!

Friday, October 24th

Well, we didn't get much accomplished today either. We decided to sleep in late (and we ll did!). We wandered around downtown LA for awhile. Then I got a migraine :( I think there was something in the air (smog maybe?) that gave me a headache every day. This day was by far the worst. So we went back to the hotel to rest for awhile. After some rest, and Excedrin, we went out for dinner in Chinatown. It's hard to tell, but Marc is standing in front of the Chinese dragons on the sign at the beginning of Chinatown.We wandered around and looked in a few shops and then had some dinner. We found some really cute Chinese outfits for the kids. Both of them cost us $18!!

Thursday, October 23rd

We left Anaheim and went to Los Angeles today. My Mom had a business trip today through Saturday. We rented a car and were going to drive to Simi Valley and see the Reagan Museum. Well, we were using Marc's laptop with the bluetooth adapter as our directions. His laptop battery died. Then we were going to use our GPS, well the GPS didn't have California maps programmed into it. So we ended up driving around the greater LA area without any directions, I was nervous about driving around a huge city even with directions. After we had no directins at all, I began to flip out! We tried to wing it. The more we "winged it" the more times we had to turn around because we went the wrong direction, the more I flipped out. Finally Marc gave in and went to the hotel. So, needless to say, because I flipped out, Marc didn't get to do the one thing that he really wanted to do. I call this my "day from hell"

Wednesday, October 22nd

This was our last day in the Disneyland parks. We went through and did our favorites again and did the couple of things we hadn't done yet. We ended the trip to Disneyland by going to their "Mickey's Trick-or-Treat Party". It was a lot of fun. Marc and Samantha got to wear their costumes. Marc was Peter Pan and Samantha was Tinker Bell.They closed California Adventure down and put up the extra Halloween decorations up. Some of the rides and attraction we open and there were about 15 trick-or-treating station throughout the park. There were also a lot of charters out for pictures and autographs. Even the adults got to go trick-or-treating. In the beginning I felt like I was begging for candy, and then I began to feel like a kid again. :)
Doing all that trick-or-treating can wear a kid, or two, out! ;)They gave a trick-or-treat bag to Marc, Me, Daddy, Grandma, and even Samantha. We got just a little bit of candy. ;)

Tuesday, October 21st

We spent a 3rd day in the parks. We went on various rides, watched a couple of parades, and enjoyed the weather.
We went through Minnie Mouse's house. There were lots of things for Marc to play with. Samantha enjoyed looking at all the colors in the house. She really enjoyed sitting on Minnie's couch.
Marc got to take part in the Star Wars Jedi Training Academy. He got to wear a brown Jedi robe and use a light saber. He got lessons on how to use the light saber and then he got to fight off Darth Mal!

Monday, October 20th

We spent another day in the Disneyland parks.Marc got to go on stage and take part in a show about using your imagination to bring your drawings to life. He helped bring Woody (from Toy Story) to life.After the show, Woody came off stage and signed the drawing for Marc.

Sunday, October 19th

We started our days at Disneyland by having breakfast with Pluto, Goofy, Chip & Dale, Aladdin, Jasmine, & Genie.
Since Marc's 5th birthday was only a month from our trip we decided to do some birthday celebrating. At breakfast he got a "birthday bucket" that had some stickers, pins, a stuffed animal, and a small cake all birthday themed.
After breakfast we headed into the park!Samantha got to experience her first amusement park ride. Her first ride was on a caterpillar in the Alice in Wonderland ride.
Since we were there at the end of October, the Disneyland Resort was decorated for Halloween.

Saturday, October 18th - Leaving for vacation in California!

Well, I was hoping to update this as we were on vacation, but it would have cost $12/day for internet access, so I am updating it now that we are back.

We left on Saturday. Marc loves flying on airplanes and Samantha had her first flight. they both did great! We were told by many that we had very well behaved children.