BUSY!!

When I came up with the idea of doing Disneyland at Christmas, all I could think about was how fun it would be to surprise the kids. I thought about how magical it would be to see Disneyland decorated for Christmas. I thought about how nice it would be to go some place warm in December. But I never thought about how BUSY Disneyland would be during that time. It was crazy. I mean really really crazy. There were people everywhere. Twice that we heard of (it may have happened more that that during that week), they had to close the park gates because they reached maximum capacity. I snapped these pictures as we were walking past Pirates of the Caribbean. Look close, there are people everywhere. It was like this everywhere we went, every single day.


I was so thankful we had two strollers with us, so we could put Nate and Aaron in the strollers (so we wouldn't lose them in the crowds). The older three did a great job of holding on to the stroller handles so they wouldn't get separated from us. And it came in very handy that both Scott and I had our cell phones with us, because quite often, he ended up so far ahead of me that I couldn't see him through all the people.

We found ourselves riding the train to get around. It was so much easier than trying to make our way through the crowds, and the boys really loved going through "the Grand Canyon" on the train. At night, the train goes past It's a Small World, which was all lit up for Christmas (you can see it behind me and Aaron). It was beautiful.



We found ourselves standing in line a LOT. And I mean really really a lot. We got pretty good at using fast passes, but there are only a handful of rides that offer those, so we just resigned ourselves to standing in line. The average line took about an hour.





We got really good at entertaining ourselves while standing in line.




I have to admit that we did lose Aaron a few times. He has a habit of wandering off. But, we found him within minutes each time (he's one lucky kid). And one time while we were in line, we looked down and realized Nate was missing. He had decided he was sick of standing in line, and had made his way up to the front of the line. I went and retrieved him and brought him back to wait with the rest of us. But all in all, we all were able to stick together and survive the madness.

I'm so glad we were able to experience Disneyland at Christmas--it had such wonderful holiday touches that you can't experience any other time of the year. But, next time we go to Disneyland, we will be going at the end of January or the end of September (which we were told were their LEAST busy times).