Celebration!

I may not have any good pregnancy or birth stories, but besides kids' birthdays, we get to celebrate their adoptions each year.  Most years, we just go out to eat or make ice cream sundaes; but this year -- also because we owed them anyway -- we went to Cliff's Amusement Park for the day.

Thankfully, we had a half-off ticket deal -- Cliff's is no Disneyland and only worth about half of the ticket price.  It's more like a permanently affixed carnival.  However, it's closer than Disneyland and with our coupon, it was like a quarter of the cost (or less? I forget what Mickey sells tickets for these days).

So C took the day off from work so we could celebrate (the coupon was also only good on weekdays) and we had a good -- HOT -- time.  I don't know what the high was today, but we felt every drop of sweat caused by it.  Cliff's seems very wheelchair and stroller accessible -- thanks to all the black pavement everywhere turning that place into a giant oven!

But anyway (I know it sounds like a mix of complaining with all the fun we had, but that's because it is) ... I got the walk-on pass and didn't do any rides.  C did a couple rides with the kids, but mostly we sent the kids on rides and we crowded into tiny shady spots with other hot parents and I tried to get some pictures as we glared into the sun trying to make out the tiny dots that we call children (way high up).

Today, our first trip to Cliff's (not H's, he went with a friend last summer), we opted not to go to the new Watermania water park portion of the park.  It just opened like a couple weeks ago and we knew it would be mobbed.  It was.  So even though some cool, refreshing, crowded public pool water sounds good on a hot day ... it probably wouldn't have been.  And the rest of the park wasn't too crowded.  Hardly a wait except for the most popular rides.

I spent a lot of time with J and O in the kiddie part of the park where I found a shady bench and they just kept making the rounds to the various rides.  There are only like seven rides in that area, so I could pretty much keep an eye on them from where I was in the middle.  Plus, I had a nice vantage point to watch the big roller coaster (the Rattler!) that circles the whole park and I managed to snap pictures of the rest of the gang as they roared past and above me.  Of course, I also got pictures of the six carloads ahead of them -- with no one I knew -- because I wasn't sure which car they'd be in and they were going so fast, I couldn't make them out in advance.  Good thing for digital cameras and the delete button.

Okay, enough of my scatterbrained commentary, here are a handful of photos, plus a bonus video at the end.  Family: I put more in the family photo album if you care to look.

Surprisingly, food costs weren't so bad for an amusement park.  These combos were like $4.50 each and included a drink.

My husband's way of cleverly labeling his cup without using his name or initial.  The nice thing about these drinks that came with lunch, if you save your cup, you can go to any snack bar and they'll refill them with water from their fountain for free.  I thought that was a great benefit (and we did take advantage of it).

This kid has been on all the scariest rides at Disneyland -- this was tame compared to some of those!  But for some reason today, he was not in love with this ride.  When he watched this video back at home, he said, "Maybe when I'm eight I'll love that ride."  Okay then.

Anyway, we're still glad to have all of them.  Even the crying one.  Ha.  Happy Adoption Day.