California Day 1: Getting the hell out of Dodge

After three days of packing, yes THREE days of packing (give me a break, with five of us, pretty much eight of us, and a million airport baggage rules we had a lot to get right! And a lot to make sure we didn't forget), we woke up way too early for Junior's good and made her drag our butts and bags to the airport.
This was a pretty exciting part of the trip for the girls. First airplane flight. This trip was going to be full of lots of firsts. Being as I had way too much to keep track of the girls were put in charge of getting through the airport security maze with their own bags.
Hey Cali, how much did you get shoved into that thing? That's not even your suitcase!
Needless to say, we were getting a lot of looks as we made our way through the airport. After meeting up with West and his crew we politely took our places in the security line and took up a half hour of their time all on our own.
Meet West's mom Suzann. She's crazy. Now I know where West gets it from During take off I looked between the seats behind me at Brynn and she had somehow figured out what the barf bag was for, and had it to her mouth. Luckily she didn't actually use it, and it got put away as soon as we were in the air. IPods were passed around, and UNO cards came out and seats were swapped many times, but the kids were good and we didn't have any issues. Though I'm sure the people at the back of the plane were beginning to wonder how many kids did I have exactly by my 4th trip back to the potty.
Granny Suzann made the kids candy necklaces for Easter and gave them to the kids in LAX. They came in handy when we needed to keep them entertained while West argued with the car rental place. The hassles of renting a minivan ha!
It was too early to drive down to Anaheim and check into the hotel so we grabbed lunch and headed to the BEACH! Hermosa Beach, for anyone who knows the area. The sand was warm, the water was freezing, and the kids were finding more shells than they could carry. I tried to get their funny reactions to the waves. Another first for them, the ocean.
After they started running into the water with their clothes on, we decided we'd better get them into suits. Clothes are limited when you're on vacation. Nothing like getting eight people completely changed with nothing but a minivan to do it in. But we managed with out making it too much of a peep show and the kids were off!Cali resorted to turning and running away at every wave. One finally caught her and knocked her down. And in true Cali fashion, she was completely pissed at the waves after that. She stopped running though.Sean screamed at every wave that him.
Jayme jumped over them.
I tried to take a picture of West and me but I was stilled zoomed in from taking pics of the kids in the water. Oops :). Suzann helped me out with a picture. My man and me.
We walked down the length of the beach to a pier.
We decided it was time to hit the road and find our way to our hotel (actually, we just ran out of change for the parking meter). We found our hotel (which was a little shady but we weren't complaining. We'd made it. We were taking our kids to Disneyland!), ate dinner at Red Robin (hello strawberry lemonade!), and checked out one last beach.
We found Seal beach (as in Navy Seal, I was a little disappointed that it wasn't real seals. La Jolla has a beach with real seals. Next time we're really going to have to take the kids to that one). A storm was blowing in and the wind was freezing cold so we didn't stay long, but we got some cool glimpses at some navy ships and some oil tankers before we headed to the hotel for the night.
Did our hotel advertise a pool? Hope no one else feels like swimming. Our circus fills the entire thing!