Christine's Birthday and Memorial Day Weekend

This last weekend was really great. My birthday was on Friday and Memorial Day was the following Monday so it was basically four days of awesomeness. Matt had to work one of his crazy shifts from 9 pm Thursday to 5 am Friday and so he came home from work and slept for several hours while Braden, my mom, and I began my birthday celebration at Disneyland and California Adventure.





We started off the day by going to the ticket booth to get my birthday pin and "Birthday Fun Card" in lieu of free admission to the park since I have an annual pass. We had tons of fun going on a bunch of rides and my mom treated us to my FAVORITE lunch in the whole wide world: Bakersfield Broccoli Cheese Soup in a sourdough bread bowl and a Coke in California Adventure. I'm salivating just thinking about it . . . Mmmmmm . . .






Braden rode on the carousel in Disneyland by himself for the first time and later rode King Triton's carousel in California Adventure by himself.

Matt met us at California Adventure in the early afternoon. We took Matt to Blue Sky Cellars because he had never been before. It's where they have a brief movie as well as models and drawings of all the future attractions they plan on putting in California Adventure. If you haven't been you have to go because it's really awesome. My mom and I have decided that we'll have to get passes through at least 2012 so we can see everything they currently have planned come to fruition.

We got to meet Handy Manny! He is one of Braden's and my favorites. However, I don't think Braden realized that this was Handy Manny.

My mom left early to go to the grocery store and then make my birthday dinner. Matt, Braden, and I continued to play at Disneyland and had a blast. We finished it off by going to the giant Disney store in Downtown Disney so I could use my Birthday Fun Card to buy some stuff. I was pleasantly surprised that I was actually able to get quite a bit of stuff for $69 (the value of the Birthday Fun Card).

We left in the early evening and came home to a beautifully prepared dinner. My mom made tomato, basil, feta pasta; fruit salad; and bread. It was a perfect meal. She even bought gorgeous tulips to put on the table. I have the sweetest mom in the world.

After dinner we did presents and cake. I was totally spoiled with presents and the cake was my favorite Costco cake. It was the best birthday I have had in a very long time and pretty much a perfect day. Thanks family!

On Saturday morning we drove up to Newport Beach to hang out with the Rob, Sarah, and Oliver Winn. On the 405 before Jeffrey and University we saw this:

We were in hysterics we were laughing so hard. I thought it was a giant stuffed bear at first but it began clawing at the air and we realized it was a person in a very large bear suit, or a giant stuffed bear that had been magically brought to life by fairies. I'm not sure but I'm guessing it was a person in a bear suit.

We met the Winns at their place and then drove down to Balboa Island where we walked around, got frozen bananas and reminisced about "Arrested Development," and took the ferry over to the peninsula. We walked around the Fun Zone and the shops on the peninsula and walked out on the pier. We came back on the ferry and the Winns took us to a farmers market in Corona Del Mar. The fruit was AMAZING. It was a really fun (and delicious) experience! Afterwards, we went to Taco Rosa (another Winn find) by the Newport Beach Temple and had a wonderful lunch. We had a blast!



On Memorial Day Matt, Braden, and I went to Disneyland again. We got there when it opened at 8 am. It actually wasn't crowded at all in the morning! We were really surprised that we were able to get on rides so quickly on Memorial Day.

We went to the Pirate's Lair (formerly Tom Sawyer's Island) which we hadn't done since it had been revamped. It was really cool! There are tons of interactive things to do and of course lots of caves and tunnels. Braden loved being able to roam around and it will be even better when he's a little bigger and he can navigate the tunnels without us having to hold him.

While we were on Alice and Wonderland the ride stopped and we were stuck at the top of the vine (the part that winds outside of the ride). Because of regulations we were the last ones to be evacuated and they had to manually move our caterpillar car down. Apparently if we were to walk on the vine and the fire department saw, they would shut down Disneyland because it's too dangerous.

Braden was not a happy camper.

It was a bummer having to wait all of that time but the awesome thing was that we got two "Attraction Readmission" passes which allow you to jump to the front of any line to go on a ride. We used the first one to go on Finding Nemo which had an insanely long line and we tried to use the second on Small World (since we'd been on pretty much every other ride already) but the nice ride operator, Mike, told us to keep it and use it on another ride and put us at the front of the line anyway.

Braden passed out on Small World and so we gave our second ticket to another family to use for whatever ride they wanted.

All in all we were able to go on 16 rides in 5 hours. It was amazing!

We left around 1:30 and went home for a couple hours before we went to a barbecue at my grandma's nursing home. The food was great and it turned out to be a lot of fun. Matt made the day of one of the Filipino employees there because Matt spoke to him in Tagalog; it was so fun to watch them talk and joke with each other.