26 Miles across the Sea- Santa Catalina is awaiting for me....

Ahh! A place that no one in my family has visited. This was Mckenna's first performance of the week and the girls couldn't wait!

Mckenna got a little sea sick and so she slept a little on the boat ride to the island. On the way home she was given a motion sickness pill so she was fine!

We were wanting to go into the water and swim at the beach but there was a bacteria in the water, so all the girls could do was play on the beach and out run the waves coming in. I thought the fun part was looking at the stores, seeing the old mission base, that is now a movie theater and seeing all interesting archetecture of the houses on the island. But the best of all was the Dance Performance with the ocean and many boats behind the girls. What an awesome backdrop!

Enjoy the slideshow of all the many pictures of Catalina

Universal Studios or Day #2

The next day our gang (lisa, me, mckenna & maddy,) went to breakfast with the double Haileys,Morgan and Holly gang (we will call them the Hailey's from now on,) at Coco's. We needed a good breakfast because we knew that the food at Universal (or the rest of the day of each day,) would be fast food and not top notch, so we decided to start with a good meal each day.


Then we were off to Universal Studios.


Lisa's desire for the day was to see if Desperate Housewives was taping (they have Wisteria Lane in the Studio Tour,) the girls desire was to get as many autograph's of stars as possible and to ride the Mummy. Well, the Mummy was closed due to reconstruction and so that one was scratched off the list. My desire was to see the fun rides that I didn't get to do at Universal in Florida- which were not even in the California park... No, spiderman, no Hulk--- nothing. What a bummer. In the evening we were getting ready to leave and ran into all the older girls who were waiting for some singer named Rihanna who was going to sign autographs and sing in Universal's version of Downtown Disney. We had a few girls that bought the cd so that they could meet Rihanna personally, but she was 45 minutes late and we had to leave before she left. Mckenna was bummed because she wanted to tell her brother's that she met someone famous. (i don't know who this girl was, how could she be that famous?)



But here are the famous people that Mckenna met!

What do you like to do at Downtown Disney?

We Like to Build Bears! Or get great Halloween ideas!!!

The last thing that we did our first day of our California trip was to visit Downtown Disney. All Spring long Mckenna and Maddy have been saving their money for a chance to build a bear (or disney character,) at Build-A-Bear Workshops in Downtown Disney, this is the night they wanted to do that. While we were looking for the build a bear store I ran into the coolest store-fronts based on Pirates of the Caribean, which I thought would make great halloween backdrops for our haunted porch idea this upcoming Halloween.

Enjoy watching the process of building a bear...
















get some ideas from my store front Pirates...

FOR DAD / GRANDPA

We went Quackers today GRANDPA!!!!

California Adventure - Disneyland

Today was a long bus ride, but we had alot of fun at California Adventure. Mckenna and Maddy hung around with the big girls and so the "older" gals got to go on a few rides without worrying about the little gals.





I took the plunge and went on the big, crazy gondola ferris wheel- which I usually refuse to do since I am so afraid of heights, but it was really fun and I wasn't half as afraid as Lisa and Heather were who screamed the whole time we were up.

Lisa& Heather before the ride started

It wasn't a very long ride and didn't go around very often as I would have liked, but it was a good start!


Lisa and I after a while reclaimed the little girls so that the older girls could enjoy each other without babysitting and the girls had fun together going on different rides.. enjoy the pics...




Mckenna went on this ride while waiting for the fastpass to activate for Screamer!!!