Shifting Gears into Fall

There is a local orchard that really goes all-out during the fall: pick your own apples, farmer's market, food stands, petting zoo, hay rides, hay mazes, apple slinging, face painting, the list goes on and on.

During a visit on our last day of vacation, Andrew was most excited about the petting zoo:


He also enjoyed ooh-ing and ah-ing over and touching the pumpkins on display. He tried to lift the pumpkin below, and when it wouldn't budge he pronounced it "stuck."

Classic fall photo op. Only minor tickling needed to achieve this smile.

We also took advantage of another amusing face cut-out photo op:

Cape May 2011

We were fortunate to recently spend a wonderful week at Cape May. Weather was great for the beach many days and other times we enjoyed riding bikes or going on various outings.

Andrew really took to the beach, even if the photo below suggests otherwise. He was happy to sit and play in the sand, destroy the sand castles we built for him, fill his bucket with shells, rocks and other less appealing beach detritus, and by the end of the week he even enjoyed splashing in the surf.

We had a great time at the Cape May Zoo again. Andrew said hi to a lot of animals and got up close and personal with these goats.


At the aviation museum, he got to sit in a lot of airplanes and helicopters and was generally well behaved. One of his most frequent new phrases is "I broke," but luckily he only had the opportunity to use this sentence in reference to an easily-fixable museum label.

Below Andrew enjoys a ride at the "amusement park" (aka collection of kiddie rides outside an arcade) up the street. He loved it!

A few more vacation photos on display here.

A Preview of What Andrew Did on His Summer Vacation

More Trains

We went back to the arboretum this weekend and Andrew got another look at the garden railway. This month, the train display had a "Circus" theme with lots of amusing cars featuring animals. The chicken car (circus chickens?) played the Chicken Dance repeatedly, which added a grating soundtrack to an otherwise idyllic scene. Andrew's funny dancing made it worth it, though. Greg got some moves in too, as you will see in the video below.

Andrew's Latest News

At 20 months, Andrew loves trying on our shoes, as you can see here. Also pictured in the top photo, he loves to play with the collection of pens we keep in a container on our desk. (Check out our classy duct tape child proofing, too!)

But his biggest news is that he can say things like "shoe" and "pen" and dozens of other words that he adds to at a rate of 2-3 per day. It's been a wild couple of weeks in terms of language development. Some of our favorites are:

• broccoli (bra-klee! I hope he always greets his vegetables so enthusiastically)
• computer ("puter," which references our old brick of a laptop that he loves to play with)
• doggie (which is rewarding after about 6 months of listening to him call dogs "fffwwwww" in a puzzling interpretation of "woof")
• yucky and dirty (characteristics he identifies with impressive skill)
• he refers to Cookie Monster with a convincing rendition of his trademark "harrumumumumum" cookie scarfing noise
• all right! (always said with great enthusiasm)
• waffle (the latest iteration of which is "fwa-full," which traces its origins to one of his very earliest words, "wawa" and later became "fwa." Clearly we feed this child too many waffles.)
  

Really, it's been an amazing few weeks listening to him talk.