Carnivale!

I've been in Pennsylvania for the past week visiting my parents. The kids and I are on a three week journey of wonder and excitement. We're staying for two weeks here, then traveling in the car for two days to meet up with my siblings in Colorado for a week-long family reunion.

My mom likes to have a good time. We've already done lots of fun things in the week that we've been here. While I reviewed the pictures from our trip, I noticed that it looks like we're at a carnival pretty much all the time. We went to the Troy Fair, the Discovery Center, the Ross Park Zoo, and Knoebel's, an amusement park with a big kiddie section. So, lots of junk food, lots of fun rides, resulting in crazy children.

This was Elliot's favorite ride at Knoebel's. It was a smaller animal carousel in the kiddie section.

My mom and Elliot on the big carousel at Knoebel's. Look closely at my mom's face. Doesn't it scream, "Carnivale!"?
Elliot and Dottie actually love to ride together.

My daughter is getting too big. She's starting to get freckles across her nose, just like her Aunt Mimi.
They loved the balls. The lady even let them play extra long because she thought they were so cute and nice to each other. Little does she know ...
And who doesn't love a picture of their kids with a creepy clown? Don't worry, he's not real (you can't really tell from the picture).

Ruby most of the time: her happy, chill self.

And sleep was definitely more of a rarity. She slept perhaps a half hour all day long at Knoebel's. Yes, it wouldn't be a vacation without some nap disruption.
Elliot was very interesting to watch on the rides. As soon as he got on one, he would look around to identify the mechanism to see how it runs. In this picture, he's looking at the middle, the part that runs The Whip. Our favorite to watch him on (of which we have no picture) is the mini bumper cars. At first, he had no idea how to run the thing. He didn't understand the gas pedal. But once he was shown by the ride operator, he started looking up at the ceiling, watching the pole at the top scrape the metal wiring on the ceiling. He wasn't really paying attention to where he was driving, so he was spinning in circles, gazing at the ceiling. It was pretty funny. Others were laughing besides just me and my mom. The other thing he did on these rides was look around at other kids' reactions. If someone was crying, he looked at them the entire ride, questioning whether he should be crying as well.

This next set of pictures are from the Troy Fair. They may look very similar to Knoebel's, because we mostly ate a lot of food and went on kiddie rides. Just like Knoebel's.

These two are showing their goofy sides in a glass maze. We kept on running into the walls.
At Mt. Pisgah, our favorite state park that has free swimming and a fun playground.
They look miserable, but they were actually having a lot of fun swimming in the rain.
Ruby loved the swing!
The Ross Park Zoo and Discovery Center: You've already seen us here before, but we have so much fun there. They've finally finished their Storytime Garden. The kids loved it.
Here we are at the Three Bears' House. I'm reading the kids a story.

Gotta love Dottie's hip pop. She's in a pretend ambulance.
Goin' fishin'.
Don't ask me what's going on in this picture. Dottie thinks it's cute to wink in pictures, not knowing she looks like she has something in her eye when she does so. And Elliot's displaying his monkey tendencies.
Ruby's in the stroller a lot, right? But she's so dang cute. I just love this baby.
The kids at the Ross Park Zoo.

We still have a few weeks left! More to come!