Lil' Diva

Kaylie and I were bored while Jacob was at school today so we went on a walk, we walked about a mile and every wild flower we saw she wanted to pick. She couldn't hold all of them so these were the flowers that were left by the time we got home. The other funny thing is that she is going through this phase where she absolutely has to wear her sunglasses whenever she's outside, and today was a super cloudy day...oh well, what can I say other then she's a Diva.

Yummm, Spaghetti

Tonight was a spaghetti night, which we don't have very often, but it's probably Jacob and Kaylie's favorite food. Usually Kaylie doesn't like getting messy, but for spaghetti she'll gladly make an exception.







This picture is cute because she's rubbing her hands together with the sauce and she closed her eyes because she didn't want to see how messy her hands were.

Sorry, but you're just too big!

This story is just funny, a couple weeks ago our friends the Simpsons gave Kaylie a doll stroller, and she's been loving it. She'll spend endless hours pushing around all of her dolls and stuffed animals. I knew that it was only a matter of time before she'd try to sit in it herself. And the best part was that once she sat in it, the bottom fell out and she was stuck, really stuck. She started crying and I made her suffer a whole 10 seconds extra so that I could get a picture of her. I think this picture says it all. So now when she sits in it, she does it very carefully.

Hurricane in Ohio! Seriously!

As I mentioned in my previous post, we had our power knocked out for four whole days and the reason it was knocked out was due to the remnants of hurricane Ike. September 14th, and Sunday afternoon it hit us as a category 1 hurricane and let me tell you that I've never seen anything quite like it. I finally got some "post-worthy" photos of some of the damage.

On Friday, we went with Tracie and Steve and their kids up to a park and it was blocked off. Once we walked up there we found out why. There was this huge tree that had been knocked over and they had already started cutting it up, but by the looks of it, it barely missed a building on its way down.

In this picture you can get a small idea of how big the tree was, Jacob is standing in front with Kaylie on his shoulders and that is Steve (my uncle) on the tree. Way in the background on the left you can see Bridger (my cousin) standing on the other end off the tree.

Still this picture doesn't do it justice. I guess now I can see why the power was out for four days. We're some of the lucky ones, there are still a lot of people here without power and it happened 9 days ago!

Jacob's Graduation

So Jacob's Graduation was actually almost a week ago, it was last Saturday. I had intended to get everything posted on Sunday but obviously that didn't happen. But I have a good excuse, on Sunday we were hit with the ruminants of Hurricane Ike, (yes we were hit by a hurricane here in Cincinnati) luckily it was only a category one when it hit us. So we had 75-80 mph winds and it knocked our power out for 4 days, approximately 80 hours, and it wasn't fun at all. I thought I'd gotten pictures of the storm but apparently not, but I do have video that I'm trying to get posted. The storm was crazy it was making our sliding door bow in with every gust and I thought for sure it would break. Shingles were ripped off our roof, but some people had parts of their roof ripped off. Huge trees were uprooted (were talking 80 ft tall and 3 ft in diameter.) Screen doors were ripped off, shutters were ripped off buildings and even some of the siding ripped off our building. It was intense, but it could have been much worse.

Anyhow, back to Jacob's Graduation. In the top picture he's receiving his diploma (sorry the pictures are really dark, I lightened them up as much as I could.) It's really hard to explain that he's had his graduation, but we're not done quite yet, he still has one more quarter to finish before we can move back out west.
In this photo, Jacob is receiving a Restorative Art Award. For some of his classes they had to construct heads out of wax and Jacob picked Gene Wilder, he did an awesome job and it really looks just like him. He totally deserved this award. (I'll post a picture of it later.)
Here's Jacob and Kaylie. Of course she's not smiling, by this point she had had it. Graduations are not by any means kid friendly. It was funny because when Jacob got up to walk she just cried because she wanted to go up and be on stage with him, so she was happy when it was all over and she could be with dad.

Such a Big Helper!

Saturdays are always cleaning days in our house. And Kaylie loves to help when ever she can. While I was cleaning the counter tops, she helped herself to the broom and swept the entire kitchen floor for me. She did it a little differently then I would have done, she swept everything very neatly into all the corners of the room.
After she was done she explained her logic in her little inaudible talk again. Here she is giving me her step by step explanation.

Oh! Hello There Mr. Cricket!

The other day I noticed that there was a cricket caught between our sliding door and the screen. And I pointed it out to Kaylie. I called him Mr. Cricket. The cricket crawled up and down the screen and she found it very entertaining. So she started to knock on the window. Then Mr. Cricket held still, so Kaylie proceeded to say "Oh, Hello Mr. Cricket!" (which was then followed by a bunch of inaudible words.) She talked to this cricket for a good 30 minutes, and she probably would have told him stories all day if she didn't have to take a nap. It was really cute!

Coney Island

On Saturday we got to go to Coney Island which is a small amusement park mostly for little kids and we thought that Kaylie would love it. We went with our friends the Simpsons and we thought that we'd have a day of fun.
Jacob took Kaylie and she got on the train with her friend Abby Simpson and at first she looked like she would enjoy it and the first couple times going around in the train she did. She'd smile and wave at us.





But after a while, I guess she couldn't see us any more and she got paranoid and then she lost it. Kaylie spent about half the ride in tears, and poor Abby was trying to console her the whole time. The thing that made it bad was that Jacob had to wait for the guy to come unlock her seat belt so he could get her out. So for a few minutes like you see her here, she just screamed for dad to pick her up.






So we thought that Kaylie would like to ride the carousel, she's been on one before and she liked it.

So here we are not even started, just sitting on the horse and she was fine. But once that carousel got going she lost it even more. I wish I had the camera on the ride with me, we put her on the back of the horse that her friend Abby was on right next to us and she held on to Abby for dear life and her face was that of shear tear, it was really funny.






At Coney Island they had this really cute miniature village, with a bunch of cute houses and stores. Here Kaylie is walking around with her friend Jeana Simpson.









Kaylie didn't do much other than walk in and out of the houses, but were glad that she enjoyed something about Coney Island.

I also took her on a huge slide and she really liked that but Jacob didn't get a picture of it, oh well!

Labor Day Fun

To celebrate Labor Day we all went to Winton Woods Park so that we could just have some family fun. We brought lots of bread to feed the ducks (which come to find out we're not suppose to feed the duck....whoops...and shhhhh!) But we fed the ducks any way. There was about a dozen ducks to start out with but then we ran out of bread because all the ducks at the lake started coming to get some. The funny thing is there were all kinds of different ducks and one lone goose (who was really mean to all the ducks.) In this picture Kaylie is waiting for some bread to give the ducks.



Here she is getting a lesson from Dad on how to throw the bread to the ducks. It was cute because every time she threw it to the ducks she would just giggle and giggle. She had an absolute blast.
Once we ran out of bread we started to walk down the lakeside and the ducks followed us, Kaylie really wanted to keep feeding them so I dug through the diaper bag and found some Cheese-Its, the ducks loved them so much that they started flying on the walk way and walking up to us to get as much as possible.



It was a super hot day today, it was 95 degrees with a lot of humidity so Jacob and I really wanted to go home but Kaylie had to stay and play on the slide. I don't understand why kids insist on climbing up the slide, its a lot easier to take the stairs. She got plowed over by a 6 yr old boy who went down the slide backwards, the boy felt awful but she was fine.
So for about 20 minutes in the heat of the day she climbed up and slid down, over and over again.



Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end so when it was time to go dad took her off the slide and had to chase her around the playground to get her in her stroller so that we could go home. Kaylie thought the chasing game was pretty fun, as for dad, not so much.