The Baby in Red

Over the weekend, we got to watch Leah strut her stuff out on the dance floor again. She busted a few new moves, as her dancing is getting better with all this practice. We attended the wedding of my niece and had a great time at their beautiful reception. Leah had a great time running around with her cousins, especially when the music started after dinner. She made a big mess of herself with her mac 'n cheese at dinner and surprisingly, her dress doesn't look too messy here. Yes, that's her running around with a wipe in her hands.



I got a chance to practice with my new camera and took a lot of pictures, but many of them turned out a bit blurry unfortunately. I'll post more pics and tell more when I get a chance...

Party Girl

We were in full holiday mode this weekend, as we had two Christmas parties to attend. The first was John's company holiday party, and the highlight of that for us was watching Leah go crazy out on the dance floor. There were tons of kids at the party, but Leah was the youngest one there. Since we don't have a babysitter yet, we brought her along. They had a special room for the kids to hang out in, with lots of food and activities for them (magician/entertainer, balloon animals, etc). We got Leah a balloon shaped like Elmo, which she just loved carrying around.

While the grown-ups finished eating and chatting, they had a DJ in another room playing really loud music for the kids to dance to. And Leah went nuts! She was running around and dancing like crazy and having so much fun. She saw the bigger kids sliding and throwing themselves down on the floor, and she just had to imitate it. There were times when we had to go and get her because of some collisions or near-collisions on the dance floor, but she had a blast and danced for at least a half-hour straight and got lots of laughs from everyone. She danced around with her Elmo balloon and by the end of the night, he didn't have legs anymore.

Here are a few pictures and a video of her (watch how she is trying to imitate the other kids sliding around), but they just don't do it justice. I wish I had thought to take some video earlier, but I was having too much fun just watching her!

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

The next night, we went to some friends' annual Saint Nikolaus party. It was a great party for kids and there were definitely a ton of them there. Leah loved playing with all the toys there, especially the little kitchen and the art easel. Santa Claus made an appearance and handed out stockings full of goodies. I was hoping to get a photo of Leah sitting on his lap, but she was not having it! I guess we'll have to hope Santa photos go better next year. Anyway, we had a great time, and here are a few pics from that night.

Thanksgiving weekend

I have to backtrack a little here, since I didn't get a chance to mention Thanksgiving and Leah's first Santa photos.

We enjoyed a delicious Thanksgiving meal at my folks' house in Michigan, and Leah got to spend some time getting to know her grandparents. I didn't really get any decent pics unfortunately. But Leah had fun entertaining everyone and held up really well after a long day of travel, etc.

We stayed at the Marriott in the RenCen, which is where John and I worked and where we actually met, so it was a nice trip down memory lane, although it has changed a lot from the time we were there. We also wanted to stay at a place where we could let Leah just run loose since she has so much fun doing that, and the RenCen has a lot of wide open spaces and isn't very busy and crowded on a holiday weekend.

The next day was Black Friday, of course, and while we had no interest in actually doing any serious bargain hunting, we did want to take advantage of the great Santa's Castle display at the Somerset Collection Mall, which is way cooler than anything we have in our area.

We wanted to get some good photos of Leah's first time sitting on Santa's lap. But after waiting for hours for our time slot (luckily we didn't have to wait in a line the whole time and actually got to walk around the mall), by the time it was our turn, she was DONE and on the verge of a meltdown (which afterwards, hit full force). And when we got up there, Leah was not too thrilled about being handled by strangers and having to sit on Santa's lap. So the photos didn't turn out that great. We had been hoping to use them for our Christmas cards, but I guess we'll have to come up with a better idea!

Weekend fun

I didn't get around to mentioning that last weekend, we discovered a great place nearby for fall festivities, Patterson Fruit Farm. This is our third visit to a farm this season, and this was probably the best place so far. This is one we'll definitely come back to, maybe even before the end of the month. It was a very popular place, judging by the crowds, and there were so many fun activities for kids.  We kept Leah really busy trying everything out.

It started out with a horse-drawn wagon ride that took us to the family fun fest area. There was a big pavilion filled with hay stacks and she loved climbing them, dancing on them, and going down the little slide and going through the tunnel.  She was fascinated with the hay and spent quite a while examining it. She got to go on her first pony ride. We thought it was cool that she wasn't scared at all. John walked around with her and she gave me a big wave and a smile every time she went around. She rode around on a go-cart, sitting on my lap while John pushed us around. She had fun checking out the inside of a tee-pee and wandering through a little corn maze.

She loved going on all the slides, especially the big 50 foot double slide. John sent her down the slide totally on her back so she wouldn't fall and hit her head. Everyone was laughing, especially Leah. She was giggling and kicking when I caught her at the bottom. She went down the slide about 6-7 times. It was absolutely hilarious to watch. She couldn't get enough of it.

When we were done with everything there, we took the wagon ride back to the little market and Leah had fun looking at the pumpkins and flowers. In the store, she found the resident dog lying there on his blanket with a few kids petting him. She went right up to him and gave him a hug, twice, and was so excited about him, shouting and pointing at him "doggie! doggie! wooo wooo". We brought home some delicious apple pie, a bag of apples and some other fun things.

I'll load some pictures here when I get a chance, but in the meantime, you can check out the photos on the right.

This past weekend, we took her to the Botanical Gardens (after a delicious meal at the Korean restaurant, of course). We'd never been to the Botanical Gardens before since it's not really our kind of thing, but we'd heard that kids seem to like going there.  It turns out they have a really neat children's garden with fun activities and there were a lot of kids running around. We didn't stay all that long actually since we got there kind of late, plus, the minute we walked into the gardens, Leah, with her big "oooo's" and "aaaah's", walked right onto the splash pad fountain that was shooting water into the air and got her pants and shoes all wet. But that was just the beginning in terms of getting soaked.

We found the children's garden, and she had fun playing in the sandbox and trying to figure out what to do with the buckets and scoops.

And then she saw the other children playing with the water pumps, filling up buckets and watering cans with water. It was cute watching Leah's discovery process. She tried to pump the water herself and fill the buckets. In typical Leah style, when John tried to show her how to pump the water, she refused any help and wanted to do it all herself.

But in the process, her pants and shoes and jacket got soaking wet. Since we didn't want her to catch a cold and it was almost closing time anyway, we decided it was time to go. She ended up riding home without pants and shoes on. Reminder to self: bring a change of clothing in the car.

Pictures to come....

Down on the Pumpkin Farm

Today, we decided to take advantage of the warm weather and check out a local pumpkin farm. Most of the fall harvest festivities seem to be starting next weekend, but there are quite a few of these places in the area so we decided to get a head start on pumpkin picking. There were only 2 or 3 other families there at the time we were there, since it's still a little early in the season. But I'm sure next weekend will be a zoo there.




There was a little animal farm that we could walk through and feed the animals, and Leah loved looking and pointing at all of them. She enjoyed grabbing the grass to feed the goats, and would not let go of it and even carried her handfuls of grass during her little train ride.




We put her in her own car at first, but she got a little scared, so we switched her to the caboose to sit with another girl and she sat and smiled at us during the long ride around the farm.




She just loved running around and pointing and shouting about everything. It was a lot of fun and we're looking forward to taking her to some other farms over the next few weeks.





They didn't offer a hayride to the pumpkin patch, so we just picked out a cute little one for her.

A Quick, Rainy Roadtrip Down Memory Lane

Over the weekend, we took a roadtrip back to John's hometown in New Jersey to attend his highschool reunion. What would have taken about 7 hours ended up taking us almost 11 hours, with all the pit stops we had to make. We couldn't quite coordinate all our potty, meal and gas breaks since this was our first long roadtrip with Leah. But on the way home, we were much more efficient and in-sync and managed to get home in record time.

Leah did great in the car since we brought a lot of her favorite toys, books, and snacks along. And she was so excited in the hotel room and had a lot of fun playing with the phone and running around exploring. She loved standing on the little balcony in the mornings while we were getting ready and watching the ducks below in the courtyard.



We went on the tour of the highschool to see what had changed. Nothing much apparently. Leah was probably the youngest child there, as many of John's old classmates now have teenagers. Leah had fun running down the hallways and sitting in the desks and playing with the computers.






Since it was raining really hard that day, a lot of the day's outdoor activities were cancelled, so we headed to one of the big shopping malls to hang out. John took Leah on the merry-go-round and said she enjoyed it, especially when she saw me each time around, but was a little scared, too. We let her out of the stroller to run around for a little while and she loved it.




The whole weekend, we got a lot of practice eating with her at restaurants. We found that what works best is putting her in our portable booster seat and sitting at a booth. That way, she has her own tray table and most of the mess ends up falling on the booth instead of on the floor. When she sits in one of the restaurant highchairs or in her booster seat attached to a chair, she drops tons of food onto the (carpeted) floor and leaves behind quite a mess. We take her out to eat a lot at home, and had nearly decided to stop going to restaurants with her because of her table manners. Now we have found a system that works and keeps her happy.





Leah and I skipped the main evening party since it was her bedtime, but since she took a late nap in the car, she wasn't exactly in the mood for sleep. It took hours to finally get her settled down, and she finally zonked out right before John came back.