Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Master Builders

Jacob and Laurie's family visited Legoland during our last family reunion and gave it rave reviews. They convinced the rest of us to join them this time around. Good thing, too, because this outing provided my favorite matching tees. 
Daily early morning matchy matchy family pictures were mandatory.
We made it to Legoland with just enough time to stand outside, do a few dance moves, strike a few poses, and make our way through the gates.




Lego hands are a critical part of optimizing the Legoland experience.

Luke's smile is contagious. He was always willing to put on a hilarious show for the camera.

Ben and Haley were Lincoln's adoptive parents for the day. They were eager to help out with him and Haley even got him to sleep for me once! 
We scored a picture with Buddy the almost-as-cool-as-Emmett Lego Guy.
There are people who would love to see the parks disguised in their Halloween alter egos, but it's actually the one thing I don't like about going to Disneyland in September. I don't really care for all the Halloween add-ins. Particularly in the middle of September. But whatever. We'll pose with the pumpkins anyway.
Sometimes at Legoland you find random balloons in your stroller that your son becomes overly attached to until fate is on your side and the wind picks up while overly attached son is on a ride and the mystery balloon disappears as quickly and mysteriously as it arrived. 
Legoland was super cute, super fun, right up my boys' alley, but unfortunately there weren't a lot of rides the whole family could go on which was a little bit of a bummer. The good part was we had two babies, so there was always company when it was your turn for baby duty.

Brooke liked to stick with Grandpa because he rode all the scary rides with her.
Jeff and Eli tried to pull out some Kragle and were sent straight to the Castle Lock-Up.
They had cute little stations where the kids could play with Legos. This was all my boys wanted to do. We literally had to rip them away from their building to try to get our money's worth out of the park.



Again, they had a little station where the kids (and a few shameless adults) could build boats and race them down some water. Eli and Carson eagerly built, played with and raced those boats for 45 minutes - 1 hour before we finally hurried them along to a few more rides. This is the face Eli made to protest our requests to step away from the boat races:

Much to my hesitation, Eli has become increasingly obsessed with Star Wars. I have never even watched an entire Star Wars movie -- and not from a lack of trying. I just cannot get into those movies at all. But Eli was hooked the minute he laid eyes on R2D2.
We spent a lot of the day with Newland! My favorite Newland quote from the whole trip was:
Me: Newland! Do you remember my name?!
Newland: Yes.
Me: ...
Newland: ...
Me: What is it?
Newland: ...Friend.
Newland is one of our dearest friends indeed!
There were brief moments we wandered around the park just as the little Excell family, but quickly realized it was a lot easier to have a few extra adult hands to snag a baby or a roaming preschooler. So we were grateful to have these four adult helping hands join us when they did!
A boy crowd favorite was the driving school.
An Excell crowd favorite was the mini land or whatever they call it. They have a bunch of different mini U.S. cities made out of Legos on display! It was incredible! My boys have gotten really into Legos since Christmas which helped them appreciate all the Lego creations in the mini cities. Eli especially ooooohhhhhed and aaaaaaaahhhhhhed over everything. I loved watching him admire and respect the art of Lego building. I could sense his urgency to get back to the free play Legos to try his hand at building after being inspired by everything he had seen. It was my favorite part of our day.
Lincoln crashed my parents' lunch date.
Then a few of us joined up to finish the day off together.
Wynne was born two months after Lincoln, though her thighs may suggest otherwise. Lincoln is trying his best to keep up.
*Cue Everything is Awesome music*
All summer long I became unrealistically paranoid about and fascinated by shark attacks. In my three months worth of late night documentary-ing, I learned September through October is shark season in California. With this information, I spent many nights devising emergency shark-bite evacuation plans should a member of our group have an unfriendly encounter with a mouth full of teeth. Unfortunately, we did have such a run-in. All my preparing and safety precautions were of no use. I panicked and took a picture rather than punch the shark in the nose like my months of training had advised me to do.
Three cheers for the one ride Lincoln could go on!
And three bigger cheers for Jeff's quick thinking to slip away from our 40-minute boat ride wait for this photo op with Emmett -- and slip back into line at perfectly the right time to still make the boat ride with us.
The weather was perfect, the park was fun, and the day was awesome!


3 comments:

Kim said...

So fun to read your rendition of Legoland right after I'd posted my take on the day. I like the picture of a bunch of us sitting on the bench in a line. The shark bite photo is cute as is the photo of Jeff and Eli with Emmett. You got a cute pic of us in the boat. Great commentary of our day at Legoland.

I'm impressed you got 8 children to pose so nicely in front of Buddy. That's a super cute photo.

Nani absolutely LOVES the picture of you with grinning Lincoln that you posted on Instagram and have here in this blog. She can't get enough of his cute little happy face.

Rebecca said...

The blue matching shirts look awesome in the pictures! I love the family picture in the beginning with Eli and Carson looking in opposite directions. Carson's pose is especially funny. I agree with Nani - the picture of you and Carson is perfect!

LC said...

Everything looks awesome :)