Disneyland!
Some notes that might be helpful to Steph:
There's an app for that. Check for Disneyland apps, I have a 'wait time' app on my phone that tells me what the current wait time is for all the rides in the park. There's also a Disney Dining app that can make it easier to make reservations for where you want to eat in the Disneyland/Cal Adventure/Downtown Disney area.
Indiana Jones is closed down for something and may not be up and running for your visit.
Sticker shock, everything is expensive, especially the food, and Downtown Disney is possibly worse/more expensive than Disneyland. But you can bring in your own bottles of water, so long as they're sealed/unopened, so that's a good way to save some money, a bottle of water in the parks is 2.99.
Get to Disneyland/California Adventure early, be there at open. There are two reasons for this. one is Fast Pass for Cars Land Racers. The other is the opportunity to ride rides from 8-12 before the parks get really packed.
When you get your tickets/enter the park make sure and let them know it's your kids's first visit, they'll all get big buttons that say it's their first time. Buttons are cool in general, but it also makes sure the cast members at the parks go out of their way to be awesome to your kids (you can probably get a button for your belly too, if you ask.
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Fast Pass lets you strategize and plan your day better, imo, it gives you more flexibility and keeps you from having stand in line as much.
And it's included in the price of your ticket. having a fast pass for a ride lets you bypass the vast majority of the line. Not all the rides have fast passes, just the most popular rides. Every ticket can get fast passes, but you can only get one fast pass every couple hours, your fast pass will say when you can get another fast pass, usually it will be in 1-2 hours that you can acquire another fast pass.
Disneyland has kiosks, usually near the ride, where you can put in your park ticket and it will print you out a fast pass. So if steph has all the tickets she can put them in at the kiosk one after the other and get fast passes for everyone (or if someone can't ride a ride, but someone else can, extra fass passes for the person who can ride the ride). The fast pass ticket says, please return between the following times to ride the ride. That's not true. The fast pass becomes active at the first time and stays active until the end of the day. For example, we had Star Tours fast passes that said to return between 3pm and 4pm and we did not use the fast pass until 10pm. Cast members will take any pass so long as the first time has arrived. We could not have used the Star Tours fast past at 2pm, but it was active until the end of the day after 3pm. Printing the range is just meant to encourage people to return in a given time, and if you read the fine print on the back, it doesn't say anything about expiring, so you are entirely good to use it any time that is convenient to you once the first time has arrived. You can check with any cast member and they will tell you the same thing, you can use your fast pass any time after the first time has arrived.
When you get to the entrance of the ride, there should be signs directing you to the 'stand by' line or the 'fast pass return' line, take the fast pass return, you'll walk past 90% of the line and only have a 5-10 minute wait for most rides.
Each fast pass ride has a limited number of fast passes for the day, I've only ever seen one ride run out of fast passes, the Cars Land Racers. We went in at 8:20 and the fast pass return was already up to 2:30, our companions said that the Cars Land Racers ride usually runs out of Fast Passes by 10AM most days and the line is 2 hours long without a fast pass!
So, optimal strategy, presuming your boys like the movie Cars, Get Fast Passes for the Racers right away. If you want to try to ride racers right away, the line at open should be relatively short (if it's not, I'd try riding other rides in the park before it gets busy rather than standing in line when almost all the rides have no lines that early in the day). There's two other rides in cars land, a tires ride and and a Mater ride, I hear both are really fun but I didn't ride them yesterday. The racers ride is a blast, a nice mix of a kind of traditional Disney Pirates of the Carribbean type of ride that then becomes an exciting, race with another car at the end.
The other best ride in California Adventure is the Toy Story Midway, it has no fast pass line, so it'd be a good one to try to get on early in the day. This is a 3D 'shooter' ride, where you ride in little cars that take you from screen to screen and you play a midway esque game at each different screen. You don't shoot by pulling a trigger, instead you tug a string at the back of your 'cannon' and however many times and however fast you pull it determines how fast you throw rings, or darts, or balls or eggs at various targets. There's a lot of variety from game to game. For instance one game had a volcano, and was a 'throw darts at balloons' game, some of the balloons in the far background on the volcano looked like lava trails and had high point values, if you successfully popped those balloons, more lava baloons would show up and if you kept popping the lava ones the volcano eventually erupts balloons which gets you a lot of points. On most of the games if you aim at high value targets and keep hitting them you usually unlock 'secrets', or if you hit all the targets in an area it will cause the game to respond, so if you hit all the targets in a cloud it might make it rain, which might result in a rainbow. and so on and so forth. I find it really fun.
We found out at the end of the day that there are fast passes for World of Color, so you might ask cast members about those, it might be a better way to get decent seats for world of color than doing a 'reserved' seating through a disney dining cross promotion.
Star Tours is popular, but not the most popular thing in the park. What we did was get our fast passes for Racers and then leave California Adventure, and go into Disneyland, we were able to walk right on Star tours as the wait was less than 15 minutes that early in the day. It's now in 3D and pretty freaking sweet! Our first one was pretty awesome, Darth Vader tried to stop us leaving using the force, then we escaped to hyperspace and came out of hyperspace at Kashyyk. we briefly saw Chewbacca and then blasted through the forests of Kashyyk ala the speeder chase from Return of the Jedi. Then we left Kashyyk and ran into Boba Fett, we tried to lose him the asteroid field esque rings of a saturn-like planet so we dodged in and out of various asteroids for a while then jumped to hyperspeed again. I can't remember the last destination, but something cool happened there and we finally delivered our rebel spy safe and sound.
The second time we did star tours at the end of the day was even better than the first one (despite no vader, fett or chewie on this one). This time we escaped some storm troopers and dodged out to lightspeed. We arrived at Hoth in the middle of the battle, after dodging some ATATs and taking some fire we tried to escape but didn't quite make it over a snow embankment, for a bit we teetered on the brink and then fell into a steep canyon run that was basically like being in a toboggan and was pretty much the most fun of any of the star tours things we did. Then you shoot out of the toboggon into mid air but the engines fail and we start falling falling falling backwards to the ground. Never fear, though, Artoo got the engines going in the nick of time and we blast out of the ravine and head back to outerspace. We jump to lightspeed again and exit at Coruscant, At the Battle of Coruscant. We weave in and out of all sorts of Imperial ships, but get hit and plunge headfirst straight towards the planet, Artoo pulls us out of the dive just in time and we dodge and weave through all the city traffic crazyness before crash landing on a platform that just happens to be where we need to be to deliver our rebel spy safe and sound.
After we left Star Tours, we went and got on Space Mountain, since it was just past nine, we only had to wait about 20 minutes. Space Mountain was redone to a pretty scary Halloween iteration, but it's still so freaking cool of a ride. We left space mountain and walked over to Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters, there was a less than five minute wait here, and I got my best score yet. Protip, aim at the triangles and diamonds, they have the highest point values, though sometimes you need to hit a round or square target that is blocking a higher point value target. We left Buzz Lightyear and got on Autopia with probably just a twenty minute wait. You can see the advantage of getting there early, we managed to do almost every Tomorrowland ride before 10AM.
Then we walked across the park to Adventureland, got fast passes for The Haunted Mansion, and got in line for the Thunder mountain roller coaster. That only had about a twenty minute wait. Then we got on Pirates, which is always a pretty short wait (about twenty minutes) and after that, our fast passes for Haunted Mansion were ready, so we went and did that, came out and decided to go get lunch.
After lunch we went back to California Adventure, did the Racers ride and Toy Story midway and spent most of the rest of the afternoon there.
California Adventure has an ice cream store next to the starbucks where they hand dip ice cream bars for you. You choose the ice cream, they dip it and then roll it in topping, Renee got a vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate and rolled in sprinkles. It was amazing. I highly recommend it, as I think the ice cream is better than the decadent sundaes across the way at Disneyland.
I don't have any big preference on park dining, most of the meals are pretty good, and it's all expensive. My favorite 'treat' at Disneyland is the hand dipped corn dog. This is only in Disneyland, they don't do them at the corndog stand in California Adventure. These are so good it is ridiculous. They dip the hot dogs in batter and fry them right there. So it's fresh and tasty and amazing. And only five dollars (the sign doesn't say that, but if you just get the corn dog, no chips, it's only 4.99, the sign says 6.19, which includes a bag of chips). Renee was VERY skeptical got two bites of mine and a few hours later we were back at the corn dog stand so she could get her own. It's not really a meal, but it's damn tasty. The corn dog stand is kinda hard to find, if you don't know it's there you'll pass it every time. Walk into the park and you walk down Main STreet USA. When Main Street comes to an End and opens to the big central plaza, look to your right and you'll see a bright red truck, and a sign that says Hand Dipped Corn Dogs.
Happy day!