Part III: Discovery Kingdom

What day are we at now? Oh yeah - it's Friday and we headed out to meet my sister and her family at Discovery Kingdom. But wait. I need to tell you about our night.

I decide to sleep on the floor with Malia because our room has a raised Cal King pillow-top bed. I swear the drop is about 4 feet to the ground. No way am I sleeping up there with the nomad. So the boys get the nice cushy bed while the girls get the... hard ground. Malia is still teething. And it's still those 2 dumb molars. So to say that she's cranky is an understatement. Add to this equation her being a horrible co-sleeper, Truong snoring like Paul Bunyan, and Kael talking in his sleep -- you have a very unhappy mom. Usually at home, if Truong snores, I either kick him awake (there's no gentle nudge in this household) or I pinch his nose until he wakes up gasping for air. When he looks over at me, I tell him that I almost killed him and if he doesn't stop snoring, I will finish the job. I swear that's what I tell him. You can ask him yourself. But since Malia is attached to me, I can't do either and have to suffer in silence, listening to him snore the night away, getting mad because he's obviously sleeping and I am not. And when I say "attached to Malia" I mean literally Malia is attached to me. She's "plugged in" all night. Just comfort sucking, using me as her human pacifier. This was one of those moments when I dearly wished she took a binky. But despite my discomfort lying on my side all night, I am profoundly glad I chose to sleep on the ground. When Malia woke up at 7:30am the next morning, she just sat up and walked away. It was the weirdest thing. She just rolled over, popped up and started walking away. Her eyes were kind of squinched, half open but I don't think she saw anything. She walked until she tripped over the blanket, popped up again and walked away in the other direction until she fell again. By that time she was more awake, saw me and started talking, walking back in my direction. I am thinking that she's going to be in her crib for a long time.

We get our act together, pack everything up, load up the car (again), give hugs and kisses, and head up to Discovery Kingdom. The kids had a great time. It was interesting to see my theme park philosophy vs my sister's theme park philosophy. Being annual pass holders to Disneyland and having gone to many theme parks down here, I'm pretty relaxed about what we do. I figure we start at Point A and work our way around the park until we leave. I almost never use a map, letting whatever catches Kael's eyes lead the way. My sister on the other hand whips out the map, whips out the show schedule and starts planning our route down to the minute, including which way we should walk to hit the maximum number of shows. It was hilarious. We ended up going up the middle of the park to see the Killer Whale show, which sort of left us stranded - do we go right then backtrack left, then head back up and retrace our steps down? It was pretty funny - in the end it didn't matter because the kids had the best time at the playground area anyway.

My favorite part of the whole day: when Truong bought all the kids Super Hero capes. Kael and Amelie got Batman capes while Jarod and Collin got Superman capes. It was freaking hilarious to see Kael do his Batman poses in line for rides. He kept referring Amelie as Batgirl and refused to respond to "Kael", saying in a very exasperated tone of voice "MOM! I'm not Kael! I'm Batman!"

And that concluded our Friday. Kael had no nap, Malia napped for almost 2 hours wrapped on me and we still had to drive another 90 minutes to Sacramento to the hotel at the end of the day.