Mini Moments

 
We sure had some wonderful Mini Moments - and Mickey moments too -on our recent trip to Disneyland with Carly and Macy and Jack (oh, and Amy and Dave!).

We started off the way we always do on a road trip, filling up with gas and buying $10 worth of junk at Holiday- and I mean JUNK. I always feel like whispering to the cashier: "Don't tell my parents that you saw me buying this stuff!" And I'm not talking a candy bar and a Coke, I'm also adding salt and vinegar chips, a Red Bull and two hostess snowballs. Actually, we couldn't find the snowballs when we started out the trip (RATS!) but found some on the way home (white, not pink, so not the motherlode, but delish nontheless).  One snowball each. And neither of us ever EVER buy them at any other time - only on road trips.

Dennis loves to drive, and I love to be driven, so we are the perfect traveling duo! When he takes off his shoes, usually somewhere right outside of Utah County, then the real fun begins.

On the ride down we chatted a bit, and at one point I opened the manual for the "Marriage and Family Relations" class that we begin teaching this Sunday, and we read through the table of contents, so that counts for something doesn't it? We listened to Road Trip CD's, we traveled in long, comfortable stretches of silence, I fell asleep, Dennis did not. We stopped in St. George and had Cafe Rio for lunch and looked at the palm trees that may have died during the cold winter, I read three newspapers, did Sudoku and crosswords in each of them (and enjoying reading the entire St. George newspaper tremendously! There is a dramatic difference between how the news is reported in a small community vs. the SL Tribune. I enjoy both styles, but had a blast reading aloud to Dennis all of the local goings-on in St. George. So personal and up close and REAL.


After 10 hours we arrived in L.A. (and I forgot how big the mountains are as you're driving out there!) We began battling that daunting traffic. Well, not WE. Dennis drove like the Parnelli Sweat he has always been, and I sat there in abject terror at the mayhem they call the L.A. freeways. We did get lost once trying to find the Hotel (Dennis thinks the reason is because when the cultured voice on the GPS said "bear left" she meant the road is bearing, and not to take the exit to the left. We were SO close but yet so far, with Disneyland in sniffing distance.But the GPS lady kindly schooled us on how to get back onto the freeway and voila, we were THERE! And Amy and Dave and Jack and Macy and Carly were standing in the parking lot as we pulled in, just walking back to their rooms with Wendy's (oh Wendy's, you were good to all of us on this trip).

It's so fun to run between rooms in a Hotel! Here is one of the first things I asked of the kids: to get in my bed with me and giggle. The reason I like to giggle when I get to the Hotel? I look at the baseboards and I don't have to dust them; that toilet? I don't have to swish it out; the bed? I don't have to make it! The carpet? I don't have to vacuum it! The meals? I don't have to cook them! Oh the heavenly, giggly joy! I brought some games with me (Uncle Wiggley!) and Amy and Dave stocked up on lots and lots of snacks. Macy said "Games are good to have, but food is more important, Grandma.")

Each morning we would hear a little knock on our door around 8:00 am, when the Huish kids would wake us up to go down for the FREE breakfast (what a deal!). The kids were all dressed so cute, with the girl's hair hair fixed so pretty. The kids were literally jumping up and down with energy and rarin' to go. Dennis and I were probably a sight to behold when we cracked opened the door to our room; old-lady and old-man-haired, still under the influence of black-out blinds, and in my case, shaking the cobwebs from my head as a result of the contraption that I bought to help with my "can't sleep AND listen to snoring" disability. I wore a fleece headband with little tiny headphones implanted in it, that I plugged into my ipad and it played white noise all night! (Dennis said I actually woke HIM up with MY snoring at one point - sorry!! I ended up selecting a background of white noise with atonal music (B, B flat, back to B, B flat ad naseum) with the lull of lapping ocean waves behind it. One time in the middle of the night I woke up, and thought the tonal sounds of the music had become all chaotic, but it was my own brain adding extra tones on top of what I was hearing. YIKES! I ripped off the headband and lay there in stunned silence for awhile. It was actually kind of torturous but it did the trick and I slept okay. However, now that we're home, every time I look at that headband sitting on my bedroom nightstand I have a little wave of PTSD wash over me. I need to put it away.
 
I'm not sure who that guy is next to me..........



Oh what FUN we had at Disneyland! It was 70 degrees and so warm. Oh sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy, especially in January!

One of my favorite things was watching the kids meet and interact with the princesses, which I've never been part of before. It touched my heart. The princesses are just born to do that I think (and Peter Pan and Flynn Ryder were born to be them too). But to watch them make that magic happen for Carly and Macy and Jack just melted me. Maybe Disneyland IS the happiest place on earth. And because it was off-season we didn't have to wait in lines for two hours to meet the princesses (although the line to meet the Frozen princesses WAS two hours so we skipped that one. But, hilarious story, we were eating lunch and the two Frozen princesses actually came speed-walking through the restaurant, at a tremendous clip, heads down, no eye contact, on their way to somewhere else, so we SAW them..........and they were shorter than I imagined............It was fun each day to see families catch their "first" glimpse of a princess or a character and to just light up!

And the day we visited the ocean was glorious. The tide was really low and we got to see the tide pools with urchins (sea urchins, not OUR urchins!). I laaahv the ocean so much. My dream would be a huge Hiatt family reunion on the Oregon Coast....................

Here are random pictures. First: The sunset by our beloved Wendy's. The sunsets are so pretty in California! Below that is a picture from google of lilacs because I love lilacs.(It has nothing to do with anything!).

I took a picture of Carly each night as she fell asleep wherever we happened to be when 8:30 hit. Here are a couple of them.

"Carly, Carly, the fireworks are bursting overhead!"

I LOVED watching Macy gaze at the flowers. She just drinks them in. She looks at them like she is mother nature herself, looking over her little creations. It's so cute. (And now I know why I had an urge to download the photo of the lilacs. Because Uncle Steve wrote that Grandmother loved lilacs, and he remembers her "drinking in" their fragranace :-)

Jack just amazed me with how he walked and walked and walked and walked just like Pioneer Children. Oh my gosh, he would break into dance whenever there was spectacular music. This photo was at California Adventure at a Phineas and Ferb show, but it was so fun to watch him just dancing away and walking his little rear end off from one end of Disneyland to the other. And the one below it is my version of "Where's Waldo?" only it's "Where's dad?" Can you find him? It's like he is presiding over all of us, keeping us safe. Pretty cute. And that's all for now!
XO Mom