A weekend of Ella fun.

A while ago, a friend had recommended Dutch Wonderland as a good place to take a young child after he took his daughter there. This weekend, we decided to take a long weekend and go up to Lancaster, making Dutch Wonderland one of our stops.

The amusement park was quite good. Ella was only able to ride the smallest group of rides, but there were quite a few for her, and she had a good time on them. She particularly enjoyed a "VR" ride, that was essentially a small movie theater in a bus-shaped capsule that rocked wildly on hydraulics. She laughed hysterically the whole time.

During our trip, we chose to stay at the Willow Valley Resort. This was a really nice place to stay too, and is very child-friendly. The resort has a indoor pool complex that's a lot like a small water park and Ella had a great time there. A lot of the water was shallow enough Ella could walk around in it. Walking in water threw her off for a little bit, but she quickly got the hang of it. We wound up getting a package plan that included breakfast and dinner at the resort. The breakfast smorgasbord is decent, but the dinner one generally left a lot to be desired. We actually wound up using one of our dinners as credit towards their Sunday brunch instead, and that was really very good, bordering on excellent which is really surprising in a buffet-style setup. It was really a day-and-night scenario with no comparison at all.

We wound up staying 3 nights, which was probably more than we needed, but it let us take our time and enjoy ourselves. I think next time we'll go for a shorter stay, and avoid the in-house dinners, but it's certainly worth doing again sometime later on.

Fun at a wedding

This past weekend was my cousin's wedding, and we went, taking Ella with us. The rehearsal dinner turned out to be a blast for Ella. One of my other cousins has a 4 year old daughter, who was dressed in a bright-pink frilly tutu type dress. Ella thought this was the greatest thing ever, and proceeded to spend most of evening running following her and laughing her head off. When Ella would catch up, the other girl would turn around and poke Ella in the cheeks. This caused Ella to stick out her tongue and laugh even harder.

It was really great to see Ella having such a good time running around and interacting with other children.

Ella has also recently started walking around in grass without having her hand held. Since the surface is uneven this is a bit more difficult for her, and she's been resistant to doing so. However, by Saturday she was chasing her cousin Jake around the yard of the church.

On the language front, Ella is now up to34 signs. The 17 new signs ella has learned since August 12th are: cheese, on, wash hands, brush teeth, potty, please, sorry, cookie, bath, duck, flower, thank you, time, swing, tree, grapes, and slow. So, Ella has doubled her signs in a month and 10 days.. not too shabby.

Ella is also taking much better to the toddler bed. She finally took a nap in the bed. For a while she wasn't napping, then she started napping on the floor in her room, and now she's napping in the bed.