L.A. with kids, Our Itinerary

 I'm still fighting re-entry after our California vacation and feeling like I need a vacation to recover from our vacation (I know, 1st world problems!), so I'm not going to go into a lot detail today, but just share an overview of our trip and then later I'll go into more detail on the parks and maybe share some tips for anyone else considering tackling the same trip with several kids.

During our spring break last week we went to L.A. with our 4 kids, ages 11, 8, 6, and 5 years old.  Since becoming a family with 4 kids a little over 2 years ago, we've stuck with car trip vacations, so this was the first time for us to fly with all 4 kids.   Thankfully my husband doesn't have to do much travel for work where he's gone from us overnight, but he did have enough day trips last year to rack up the airline points, so all 6 of our airline tickets were free!

We arrived early enough on day 1 to have a full half-day at Disneyland even after checking in at our hotel.  And somehow after all that the kids still had energy for a late night swim in the hotel pool!

Then, on day 2, we drove about an hour to Legoland.  We debated this many times before our trip, but I'm really glad we ended up doing it.  Our 6 year old is a HUGE Lego fan and that's what put us over the top to making it a priority, but we all had fun at Legoland.  It was much less crowded than Disneyland and therefore a little less stressful!  I actually have more pictures from our Legoland day than Disney because I was too busy during our Disney days to get the camera out much!

  

Day 3 was Disney all day long - like 9am to 10pm!  But we got to do nearly everything we wanted to do.

Then by Day 4 we (and by we, I mean my husband and I) were ready for something different than amusement parks so we drove into downtown L.A. and saw Hollywood and then the beach!  We ate lunch at a open-air restaurant right on Venice beach!  The water was pretty cold for actual swimming, but the kids enjoyed a little sand and surf.

Of course, with 4 kids at the beach in their clothes that you plan to eat lunch in, someone is bound to get really wet!  Notice my 6 year old son on the right in the picture below:

He squatted down just before a wave rushed in and kept insisting he didn't know HOW he got wet!  Day 4 was again capped off with swimming in the hotel pool (do you notice a trend here?).

Then Day 5, after breakfast at our hotel, my husband took the kids to the pool to swim so I could pack up.  We flew back that afternoon.