2009 Fair

It was a fairly cool day today for July, so we thought it would make the perfect evening to go to the fair here in our town. We had a lot of fun and the kids really enjoyed themselves! First we went through all the barns and saw the animals. Checking out the pigs......

I think dairy cows are so cute!

Daddy and Anna checking out the sheep and goats. She's saying, "baaaa!"

Benjamin was really pleased with himself that he pet the goat. He kept telling me afterwards, "that goat was a nice goat, it didn't bite me at all!"

We both thought this guy needed a haircut! :)

Ducks!

Anna really loves ducks right now. She says, "Duck....quack! quack!"

They had a pony ride, which Benjamin loved!

I had to work pretty hard to get pictures of him smiling during the ride, he was so serious!!!

See that scowl, Anna's attitude is really starting to come about and she shows us this face quite often!!! (Usually while shaking her head & telling us no!) Fortunately, she's still pretty sweet too!

We walked over to some fire trucks they had there and one of the firemen was so sweet! He got right up and asked the kids if they wanted to drive the truck and wear a helmet. Benjamin even got to do the horn!

He LOVES firetrucks! Look how happy he is........

The helmet was a little too heavy for Anna, but she still loved getting to drive!

Anna checking out some extremely cute itty bitty baby deer!

They also got to see chickens, roosters, raccoons, birds, our pastor's wife and her alpacas, pet and see bunnies, and they got to meet a police officer and he gave them stickers. We may or may not have also enjoyed some yummy fair food which may or may not have included a very tasty funnel cake! :)

Dinosaurs!!!!!

We met up with Uncle Jimmy, Aunt Shawna, Cousin Jack, and Uncle Mike today at a Children's Museum in Cincinnati that had a traveling dinosaurs exhibit. Benjamin is really into dinosaurs lately and he was so excited to go.....esp when I put his dinosaur shirt on for the special occasion. We all had a lot of fun at the museum and hanging out with our extended family! :)

We got to the museum a little early, so the kids had fun checking out a big dinosaur and it's baby outside the building.......


The dinosaurs were really cool and life-like. They moved different body parts and made noises. Anna wasn't scared at all, which was pretty impressive.....but not surprising!


Momma's favorite.....the Triceratops. Benjamin is pretty impressive and can point out triceratops and terradactyls all by himself!

Benjamin and Daddy had fun pushing the buttons to make the dinosaurs move!

So happy! :)

Then we headed to the children's museum part of the museum building. The kids had a lot of fun in this ball area, but I think the daddies and Mike had more fun! ;) Benjamin really enjoyed waiting under this ball trap with his bag to catch all the balls when they fell out.......

Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Mike really enjoyed making this arch.....

and then Benjamin and Jack got to knock it down! See Benjamin waiting with his hammer?

Then Anna had fun building towers with Uncle Mike!

Benjamin had a ton of fun playing with one of his favorite things right now........DIGGER TRUCKS!!! :) He would shovel up the rocks and put them into the bag hanging from the digger truck and then pull the rope (as seen in the picture) and dump his load of rocks into another truck.

We were trying to walk through some of the other exhibits to get to a tree house when Anna came across this baby doll. She has a couple of little stuffed baby dolls that she could care less about, but she LOVED this life-like baby doll. We could not get her to put it down!!!! I think we will be getting her one and a crib or something in the very near future to help her get ready for Little Three!

Daddy, Uncle Mike, Benjamin, and Anna all had a lot of fun doing rub drawings. Anna had so much fun that she threw quite the fit when it was time to go eat lunch and put the crayon down!

They had a fairly inexpensive little cafe on the top level that we all enjoyed lunch together at. I thought Anna and Jack were so cute eating together at the end of the table, but none of the pictures of them turned out very good. Oh, well! It was such a fun day!!!!!!

We had another ultrasound this week of Little Three to check on his/her weight. The baby continued to be bigger than it should be. They won't change my due date though b/c they say early ultrasounds like the one I had months ago are the most accurate. So instead, they are having me go ahead and test for gestational diabetes. I failed the one hour test and will do the three hour one on Monday. I passed the three hour one with Anna, so fingers crossed!!!! :) We were excited to have another look at our sweet baby! Here's the picture we got this time.....

The baby's head is on the left side, there's a hand in the middle and the baby's knees are on the right side of the image.

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I thought I'd go ahead and do some Anna updates too, for memory keeping purposes! :) She continues to talk amazingly. She can say pretty much any word you teach her and remembers what most mean and will repeat them on her own. She knows quite a few animals, like horse, cat, dog, duck, monkey, fish. She knows what a dog and duck say, but everything else she just says "ah! ah!" like a monkey! :)

She learned her body parts a few weeks ago and was better at saying them than pointing to them at first (which I've never seen a kid do before)! She can say and knows where her head, hair, eyes, mouth, nose, tongue, ears, belly, hands, fingers, feet, and toes are!

This past week she really surprised us and started saying three-word sentences like, "bye bye truck"(/Elmo/bath/etc. etc.) and "Where Daddy go?"

Her biggest achievement though is the breaking through of her sixth tooth. The poor girl has been working on getting the two teeth next to her two top/front teeth for over a month! Her front/top teeth have a gap between them and these two that have been struggling to come in were angled towards the ones already out and couldn't come down anymore. I was just getting ready to take her in to get them checked out when the day before, one of them started to break through!!!! I'm so relieved for her that she was finally able to get these out and hope the poor girl doesn't have too rough a time with any more! :)

New York Vacation

We had a great trip this past week. We drove to Rochester, New York to visit friends from college (9 1/2 hour drive). The kids did very well in the car and we had a wonderful vacation! As you will soon see, we got lots of pictures!

We stopped along Lake Erie to stretch our legs and weren't disappointed! Talk about a great rest stop! :) Benjamin and I fed the sea gulls......


Anna was happy to be out of the car and silly as ever!


My family! The edge of the Lake had all these little waterfalls where streams were emptying into it.


Geese! Anna was done posing for pictures at this point (as I'm sure you can tell) and just wanted to "Walk!"

The first full day we were there, we visited the coolest children's museum I've ever been to. The kids had a grand time! The first exhibit we went through was Sesame Street. Benjamin just got into Sesame Street again this past month and Anna just developed her love affair with Elmo, so it was perfect! :) Here they are on the steps of Sesame Street (they don't seem to want to both look at the camera at the same time these days!)


Anybody home?

It's Big Bird!!!!

Anna's favorite.....Elmo! She really wanted touch him! :)

They had a cool thing where you could sit and it would tape you and make it look like you're on Sesame Street on the TV!

In case you're wondering, Anna's pointing and declaring, "ELMO!!!" in this one! ;)

Benjamin played on Elmo's computer......

So of course, Anna did too......

Checking himself out in these cool mirrors.......

Playing me a song on Elmo's computer!

They enjoyed checking out Big Bird's nest!

Benjamin was so sweet and waited really patiently for one of the driver's seats to open up in this big helicopter they had and he wasn't disappointed!

They had fun playing with a cute little table and tea party set. Need a spoon?

There was a huge Bernstein's Bears section that the kids had a blast playing with! Benjamin was so tickled with himself for holding both their hands in this picture!

Our friend, Stacia, was sweet and made Dave a yummy birthday cake. I'm pretty sure Benjamin was the most excited of anyone! Helping Daddy blow out the candles........

The next day we drove to Niagara Falls. I have extended family in Buffalo and have been a few times as a kid, but it was Dave's first time. This is on the bridge we crossed to get to where you can see the waterfalls. The edge of the water is where the fall begins of the smaller water fall.

And here's a view of the "small" waterfall........

Here's a shot of the bigger waterfall as we were walking down to it (it's the shape of a horseshoe).......

Benjamin and Dave went for a potty break, so Anna and I walked down and enjoyed the views by ourselves. The kids were pretty grumpy the whole time, but I finally got a smile out of Anna (the edge of the water in this shot is where the fall begins).

And then the mist started falling on us for the first time.......

Anna's favorite part of the falls is when the boat came through! As it left, she just kept waving and saying, "Bye bye boat!" over and over!

Good thing they had hoods, b/c the mist would just randomly start falling down on us like rain!

All four and a half of us! Please excuse the messy hair.....it was windy and misty! Also, if you notice, none of these are that great of the falls. Between the mist and being on the wrong side of the falls (the Canadian side is much prettier), it's hard to get a good shot!

The girls! I thought this one was funny b/c it looks like Anna is sitting on my Little Three bump (which it actually often feels like she's doing when I'm holding her)! :)

Anna and their baby, Sariah, having some girl chat!

Kid pow-wow!

Awe! Look at these sweet kids!

Unfortunately, that sweet moment ended in this..........

As we were leaving, we got a group shot. Unfortunately, Adrian's face was blurred out by a rain drop! :(

My little cheeser!

Happy Fourth of July! The kids played outside in their matching outfits. They were only in the shorts for about two minutes before we went back inside and put on pants and jackets!

Swing time!

When we got back inside, I tried to get pictures of them in their matching red, white, and blue. Unfortunately, Anna didn't feel the need to be that close to her brother, thus the need for the paci (at least it matches the theme!).

I liked this one b/c they were both playing with their hair! That's my kiddos! They are either playing with my hair, theirs, or each others! :)

That evening the kids got to enjoy their very first baseball game! It was a big hit with Benjamin and considering we kept Anna up WAY past her bedtime for it, she did great too!

Benjamin and Anna enjoyed some cotton candy. We've never gotten Benjamin to eat it before (he could never get past the texture), but seeing Anna gobble it down enticed him this time and he actually enjoyed it!

Anna loved it, but the little stinker kept trying to feed it to me. Out of all of us, I was the only one who doesn't like cotton candy and she just kept trying to stick it in my mouth! :) Do you like her goatee?

Mmmmmmmm!

Since Benjamin was so good, we got him a special treat......ice cream in a little baseball helmet! He was overjoyed!

After the game, we stayed and watched the fireworks. We got super lucky and while they were setting up fireworks on the field, we got to watch some really big ones they were doing in the city!

Anna really enjoyed them and kept clapping and pointing and gleefully yelling, "fireworks!"

While we were waiting, they played music and Anna started moving and grooving! She was quite the superstar as two different people told me how cute a dancer she was as I was carrying her out after the fireworks were over and I have no idea where they were even sitting!

Before the stadium fireworks began, they played a speech John Wayne did about why he loves America and showed pictures on the jumbo-tran. This shot's for my dad! :)

Anna loved both sets of fireworks!

Benjamin did good the first couple of minutes, but then he all of sudden turned to me and said, "lets leave!" I picked him up and the poor thing was shaking! I put my hands over his ears and he seemed to do much better after that. He was so cute and kept telling everyone (including today.....3 days later) about how the fireworks were loud and they hurt his ears and scared him, but Momma covered his ears and then it was okay! :) When Dave saw that Benjamin was scared by them and I was having to cover his ears, he tried doing the same for Anna. It just made her mad though and she kept pulling away.....she could have cared less about the noise! You can kind of see the trepedation in his face in this shot, poor guy!

It was a great trip and we're so glad we did it!