Crying To LA

I have two more posts worth of pictures from LA to post, so here is the first part.

The drive to LA started out wonderfully, we were munching on snacks and listening to music and a Harlan Coben book on CD.

The only bump we ran into was a traffic jam where we sat still for 15 minutes on the road and sang all sorts of crazy songs to keep Ella happy.

A motorcycle accident had been the cause of the jam and they hadn't yet moved the body from the side of the road and that was a little bit of a shock, not exactly a sight we had been planning to see on our trip. 

It makes you cherish the fact that you get to be alive and on vacation with your little family.

The poor family of that motorcyclist.

We stopped for some lunch

But a few hours after that things began to go downhill fast

Little Girl has is not all that great at being able to sleep outside of her bed, she's an amazing sleeper in her own bed, but anywhere else is a struggle.

So she cried and cried and cried, so tired but unable to fall asleep and so angry to be stuck in the car for so many hours.

Until finally this happened (but only for 30 short minutes):

Finally we made it to LA!

We spent that first evening at Downtown Disney where there were several live bands and a swing dancing party and Earl of Sandwich, which is one of our absolute fave sandwich places.

Ella was just happy to be out of the car.

Whenever we have the stroller, Ella would much rather help push it than ride in it. 

Um, yeah, just take that picture above of us at In-N-Out but replace the background and you've got this picture, kind of amazing that the exact same pose is happening here, whoa.

Okay, now totally switch gears, for the last few days of the trip we stayed in Santa Monica, you already saw half of our trip there.

This is Santa Monica Pier:

^Lala dancing to the guitar music

There was the Farmer's Market and 3rd Street Promenade

We would feed Ella in her highchair in the bathroom of whatever hotel we were staying at, if she got hungry between meals at restaurants.

Oatmeal packets and Easy Mac N Cheese worked perfect for this.

We also had an entire duffle bag packed full of only snacks that we took with us, we are snacking champs over here with prego me and toddler Ella.

And then there was the beach, which Ella loved.

^Adam body surfed

^And Ella dug in the sand.

Little Girl with her pigtails totally made me think of the sunscreen girl.

And oh my goodness, we mastered sit-down restaurants with a toddler, we could be in and out of a restaurant in less than 30 minutes when Ella was grumpy.
Kind of a waste to go to a sit-down restaurant when you can't enjoy the atmosphere, but oh well, we couldn't eat only fast-food and snacks for a week.
We had some super yummy food while we were there, but I'll cover that in the next LA post.