Fun at the Wildes

Our next stop, after visiting Christy's sister in Virginia, was to go and visit Kyle's sister Chelle (some of you may know her as Rochelle) her family in Ohio.

Here are some great group shots where you can see pretty much everyone in her family:

One of the best parts of our trip, both in Virginia and Ohio, was to watch how Gabbie interacted with all of her cousins. Her cousin that is closest to her in age is Chelle's youngest son Graham, and he and Gabbie became the best of friends right off the bat. We got some of the cutest pictures with the two of them while we were there:

Another thing that we got to do while we were there was to go and visit some of the great sites around Cleveland where the Wildes live.

The first place that we were able to visit was the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. This place was pretty cool, cause not only did it have displays of dinosaur bones and gems and rocks and stuff, but it also had a Discovery Room (where kids could do hands on stuff) and an outdoor section where live animals could be visited. Chelle's kids favorite part of the Museum was Lucy the Otter. Gabbie mostly liked the dinosaur bones and Gems the most.

While we were at Chelle's Lincoln, Chelle's oldest boy, had his fifth birthday. For his birthday party he wanted to have some friends over to make a Star Wars movie. Kyle was nominated to play Darth Vader in the movie, and it actually turned out really cool (a couple of Chelle and Jeremy's friends had some pretty sweet costumes.)

Another fun part of the trip was being able to visit the Cleveland Zoo:

The Cleveland Zoo is really cool because it is broken up into two parts: an outdoor portion and an indoor portion. The indoor portion is called "The Rainforest." I think that we liked the rainforest part the very best.

Gabbie (not to mention Mom and Dad) seemed to have tons of fun (as usual) at the zoo.

We've developed this new tradition whenever we go to a zoo of determining which animal at the zoo was Gabbie's favorite. Both of the last two times we have gone we have had a hard time deciding between the monkeys and the tiger/leopard. This time, because we were on vacation (and we noticed that this zoo's gift shop was fairly reasonably priced), we decided that we would buy Gabs a stuffed animal representative of her favorite.

Since Christy and I couldn't tell very well whether she liked the monkeys or tigers, when we got to the gift shop we picked out two cute little stuffed animals: one cheetah (that looked like the leopard at the Hogle Zoo) and one Gorilla (it was pretty cute, you should've seen it). We decided we would hold both out in front of Gabs and let her decide (by reaching for the one that she wanted) what was her favorite.

The resulting scene was hilarious: She gave both animals a quick look, then lunged, almost falling out of the stroller she was buckled into, for the Cheetah. There was no doubt which animal was Gabbie's favorite.

Since that time she has taken Whiskers (the cheetah) everywhere she goes.

The last day that we were at the Wildes we got to visit one of the famous Cleveland Area Metroparks (see Chelle's blog). The experience didn't disappoint.

Not only was the scenery extremely beautiful, but there was a castle there that was awesome to look at (see upcoming post).

Thanks Wilde Family! We had a blast!