A new bike!

Ellie began reaping the benefits of her third birthday about a month in advance with a trip to "The Target mall" with her Baca and Lola. The trip resulted in a new bike complete with training wheels!

It took her a while (about a day) to get used to pedaling and steering, but once she got it, she was unstoppable (with the exception of going uphill)!

At first, we had to put rubber bands on her feet to keep them on the pedals!

Siri had a great time outside with her Baca and Lola too!

A happy (almost) three-year old!!

Oct. 25th: A day in history!

I suppose the biggest reason to have a blog, for me anyway, is to mark monumental events in the lives of my children and to share the joy we experience with you all! And here I've forgotten to mention that Siri can walk!! I suppose I'm only a little behind but really this should have been posted a while ago!

On Oct. 25th Siri ventured out and took her first steps alone! She walked a lot before this as long as we were holding her hand (yes, just one hand is all she needed)! But she finally realized she could do it on her own, which was very exciting to us all! She is still slow in the process of making walking her new form of transportation as she still prefers crawling, but today I caught her walking from one place to the other without any of my encouragement! She stands extremely steady on her feet, but can still only successfully walk maybe five feet by herself. But she's on her way!

Enjoy the video! :)

Neighborhood friends

Our latest source of entertainment in the afternoons while waiting for Joe to come home is playing right outside our front door with the kids that live next door and just across the way! This is somewhat of a new thing, though they would all occasionally play together during the summer. But now that the weather's getting cold, they've finally all decided to be friends! It's been nice for Ellie to have some kids to play with right out her front door. So here are some pics of the kids (mostly Ellie) playing right outside.

Ellie and Reef (notice Reef's glasses!):

Reef and her parents moved to America recently to learn English so our interaction with them consists of very little (though increasingly more!) words.

Here Ellie is riding Reef's bike, a regular occurrence as Ellie does not have one!

The kids in this picture live right next door. The girl is 5 whom Ellie gets along with and plays with the most and the boy is just 3 months younger than Ellie. They also have an older sister,7, who they play with too when she gets home from school:

Another regular form of entertainment in our household is smoothies (oh and phones)!

Disney Part 3 (Day 5 and 6)

We decided on Tuesday to go to Hollywood studios as there were many characters to see including Ariel!

Our first stop was "The Voyage of the Little Mermaid." Here we are waiting to get into the show:

We ate lunch that day at the Sci-Fi Theater! :)

Then Ellie played in the "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" play area with Lola and Siri while Tod and I did the "Rock 'N Roll Roller Coaster" and "Tower of Terror"

Then of course we did the backlot tour! :) (Ellie stayed on Tod's shoulders most of the Disney trip-Thanks, Tod!)

Here we are in line making our way through props to get to the bus:

And although there were huge explosions of fire and rushes of water, Ellie and Siri loved the tour and did not show one sign of fear the entire time, much to my surprise! It was scary!!

As we were on our way out of the park (it was getting late and we were ALL tired), we saw a small line of kids forming who were waiting to get their pictures taken with characters from Monsters Inc. We couldn't resist:

And then we decided that was it! It was a long enough day and the kids were tired! Until we saw.....BUZZ AND WOODY!

Even Ellie perked up to see these guys! :)

And now we're really leaving...

The next day we were off to Animal Kingdom! From what I remember, this park was new the last time I was at Disney so we didn't spend a lot of time there and I wasn't too interested in going back there again this time. But it was actually a lot of fun and there were plenty of kid activities! Ellie and Siri love animals (as I'm sure most kids their age do) so this was all very exciting to them!

Here's Ellie waiting for the tram:

I love all the green!!

We are bugs at the bug show! :)

We found a petting zoo!

I love this one of Ellie playing "Mancala"

Poor Siri is thirsty!

The last thing we did at the Animal Kingdom was the Kilimanjaro tour:

Then it was off to Epcot again to actually go on the Nemo ride; which was awesome, by the way!

The aquarium you see after you get off the ride was quite impressive!

They also had a lot of little fish tanks with all different kinds of fish in them. :) We ate dinner in Italy that night (AMAZING food) and then stayed around to watch the fireworks show:

Goodbye Epcot!