Day 8: The Magic of the Mouse

Day 8: Anaheim, California/ Disneyland

After we returned to Fallbrook from San Diego, we reunited with the kids by spending the next day at Disneyland together!

Disney does it right. The whole day was truly magical for Maximus and Maggie!

Maggie plays along with a little bluegrass band. She loved it!

Meeting Cinderella:

We just happened to be in the right place at the right time for Maggie to have a completely magical moment meeting Cinderella. Several parents had warned us not to promise Maggie that she would get to meet the princesses because you often have to wait more than an hour in line to meet them and sometimes it's not worth it to spend that much of your day waiting. BUT... Cinderella just happened to show up just as we were leaving the Turtle Talk with Crush attraction. Maggie RAN up to her and hugged her long and hard. My little girl was totally star-struck.

After she said goodbye to Cinderella and came back over to me, I asked her if Cinderella had said anything to her. Maggie said in a hushed whisper of reverence (which many of you know is NOT normal for Maggie!): "No, she touched my face and kissed me." What a sweet moment for my little one!

After several hours at the park, we took a break and met up with Lucas' brother Joe and his wife Tammy, Lucas' Grandma Norris and Aunt Debbie, and our friend Jim for dinner at Downtown Disney. We loved getting to see all of them!

Jim is our Disney hero. We've become friends with him over the past few

years via Jake and Laura, and he is such an awesome guy. Even if he didn't use his

Disney management position to get us free tickets to the Mouse House. :-) Thanks, Jim!

After dinner, we actually took the kids back into the park to squeeze a bit more fun out of the day. We were there on Jacob and Laura's 10th anniversary, so we finished our magical day on the Jungle Cruise in honor of them. This is where Jacob proposed to Laura (with quite a bit of elaborate scheming and planning!) over ten years ago. Of course, they were in beautiful Hawaii celebrating on their own, but we got our little bit of celebrating in ourselves in honor of their big marriage milestone. We left a little song on Laura's voicemail while in line for the cruise:

Happy Anniversary to you,

Happy Anniversary to you,

In honor of your big day,

We're on the Jungle Cruise!

or something like that. :-)

All in all, a VERY magical day. Like I said, Disney knows how to do it right. We were so thankful for these awesome memories with our kids!