Vacation

There are a lot of pictures here, and my writing is at the end. Enjoy!

At the Cincinnati Zoo - loving the gorillas



Also loving the carousel

and the ice cream

Feeding a giraffe a snack with Grandmother

At the park, playing on the playground

The rest of us at the playground :)

Going down a covered slide (when she used to be afraid of them)

Touching a starfish and horseshoe crab

Not happy to be on a frog at the Newport Aquarium

At Steak and Shake

Toledo Zoo with Grandma and Papa

Hey, there's something in there

Watching movies at Grandma's in her new chair

Charlotte and Aunt Liz

As a teacher, when I say that I love summer, it's an obvious statement. Of course I love summer; I'm home with my husband (also a teacher) and child with no work responsibilities, no alarms set for waking up and very few time obligations to adhere to. Summer, for those who know us, is the time of year when we get all of our house projects done: we paint, pull up carpet, move furniture, reorganize daunting spaces.... Since so much of our non-summer time is taken up by teaching, preparing to teach, grading what we teach and functioning, we don't really have time to do these projects during the year.

Another summer tradition lately has been to take a trip to Ohio to see our parents. This year, with Baby #2 due in mid-December, we won't be making the trip for Christmas, so we took a long two weeks to make sure that everyone had their fill of Charlotte to last them until they come visit us to see Baby #2 in the winter. The grandmothers spoiled, the grandfathers played with and read to...it was a delightful trip.

I considered posting these pictures in installments, because I know you get bored looking through a lot of pictures at once. Then, I thought that it's been difficult to blog consistently over the summer (obviously!) and they're just pictures, so I'm just going to post them. Whatever. I like seeing pictures of people's lives, so you probably do too.