Rooster at the Oley Valley Dairy Petting Zoo

Reinhart Roundup...and Katelyn

These videos aren't all that exciting but Kate is really getting adept at bikes and other pedal "vehicles." She had her share of choices at Cousin Amy's, including a risky go at the motorized Jeep which she proceeded to run right into their fence (and of course that video wouldn't upload properly)...

Hanging at Nana's...

We spent a lot of the day with the Reinhart's, and Kate had a ball with the kids. Here, they take a (messy) cupcake break after dinner at Nana Fo's...

And Nana has a big girl bed in Kate's room there too, which Kate tried for the first time this weekend.

And in the morning, we took a ride to the playground and petting zoo in Oley, and Kate brought her lil' buddy "Ally." We had to buckle her up in her own seat for the ride!

16 weeks...

Happy Labor Day!

Thanks to Nana and Papou for stopping by today, Kate was such a (tired) happy girl going to bed tonight!

Judy cousins!

Jared and Gina moved to Delaware a few weeks ago (yay!), and we all crashed their place this weekend. The kids had a blast hanging out together, and they put Mom-Mom to work keeping them busy (and happy) like reading the many books they brought to her lap...

Poor Isaac doesn't get to run around with the other three yet, but he sure seemed to enjoy having his big sister Leah and bigger cousin Kate around him. And they were pretty excited to try to entertain (or tickle) him too. His belly laughs were priceless!

The bigger kiddos spent a good amount of time coloring together too. The phases of "coloring" were amusing: Kate diligently working to color the creatures on the page and sharing crayons with Leah and Evan; Leah talking excitedly about the fact that she was coloring, but mostly she just enjoyed being there with her cousins and holding a crayon or two or ten and helping Kate pick a new color; and Evan who was more interested in peeling the paper off the crayons, and had to keep being reminded to keep the coloring on the pages, rather than the dining room table! Very cool to see them being "big kids" together though, very cool indeed...

This is a real horn from the World Cup in South Africa. Gina's dad was actually there, and they had this "instrument" there at the house. We were SO glad Kate was able to find it and test its strength. Take it from us, those things really ARE as annoying as they sounded on TV, even without her being able to fully understand how to make it buzz rather than just yelling through it!!

Sunday morning was spent outside enjoying the beautiful weather. Amid a funny toddler soccer "game" was a lot of sitting in the yard, picking grass, and general meandering about...

Cute lil' girls!

Here's a little taste of their little soccer shenanigans... and we all grimaced that our kids are almost to the age of getting into sports like this, knowing full well they usually resemble a little bit of what we've caught here on video, and we're not quite ready for that!

Some videos from Ocean City...

Here's Kate chasing a little birdie down the beach...forever! You can see where I start to panic, and please forgive the beached whale that comes into the picture when I try to at least keep an eye on her as she runs away!

Here we are waiting for the ferris wheel with the tunes blaring nearby. Kate was clearly a fan of the DJ. If you think it's just another dancin' kid video, just wait until the second song starts! Talk about "good vibrations!"

And one of Kate's favorite things to do last weekend at the beach was drawing in the sand. It all began with digging for sand crabs with Daddy, and when that wasn't very successful, we watched her doing this much of the rest of the weekend ...

Last hurrah for summertime!

Here's a rundown of our trip to Ocean City and Rehoboth Beach last weekend to round out the summer...It was just the three of us and we had a blast with our little fish. Even when the waves were rough and technically dangerous, Kate enjoyed hanging with Daddy and getting dunked a few times!

Kate's specialty in the "beach kitchen" is Ducky Soup!

She also LOVED drawing in the sand, so we were trying to show her the letters to her name so she would try to trace them...she was more interested in drawing long wiggly lines across the beach instead ...

Her first ferris wheel. No fear of the height whatsoever, despite Mommy's terror that she was so intent on sitting right next to the opening to our little seats!

A hungry little shark in the morning...

Such focus building sand creations on the beach. It was very fun to watch her play and build by herself a lot of the time we were down there. If you can see her little chin cocked out to one side in this photo below, I've noticed lately that when Kate's concentrating on something, like coloring, or painting, and here on the beach building, she moves her chin and jaw back and forth really fast while she's doing it, it's a funny little tick I guess, but it's very cute.

We made a stop at Rehoboth while we were down there, because Funland is just so darn...fun!

Kate and Jesse took a "spin" on the mildly crazy car roller coaster since Kate was finally tall enough, but he'd probably think better of it next time. It was pretty rough. This is a pic before the ride started. Afterwards, Kate's face was pretty blank, and Jesse had a stomachache!

Back in O.C. we took another bike ride on the boardwalk like we did last year. We debated her own bike with training wheels, but maybe next year we'll be ready for that...

A stop for some shenanigans on the beach playground to get her moving a bit...

Kate's newest love on any playground is now the rock climbing wall. There was one in O.C. at a big park playground and she LOVED it, and was decent after a few attempts. Here, she tries one during a stop at Bethany Beach, and then when they returned to the O.C. park the next day, she was going up all by herself! It was pretty cool to watch her try to figure out her next move and get better at problem-solving, instead of saying "I can't do it" and falling back into our hands like when she started trying it....

And finally, on our last night in Ocean City, we promised Kate we'd go back to the "fair" and hit the Jolly Roger amusement park rides for one last shabang, and she loved it. Such focus during each ride, but then she'd run off super excited about it.

And I'm sorry this one is blurry, but this one actually did more than go round and round, and Kate was enjoying the ups and downs of the balloons on this ride (it must have made her belly flip each time or something) and I tried to catch her actually smiling while she was on it...

#2 is on the way!

Okay, so it's about time I posted some big news for our little family. We're little now, but we're about to be a little bigger come February! That's right, Kate's going to be a big sister, and we're all pretty excited about it. Below is my belly at 12 weeks (that was 3 weeks ago) and now that I'm not spending my days bent over trying not to throw up, I am starting to wrap my mind around what's about to happen to my body and my family in a few months.

Pretty crazy stuff... but woo hoo!