Here are Kendra and I all dressed up at a friend of ours’ wedding.  I’ll leave that to Kendra to blog about.

 This is a great shot of Levi in a bouncer at one of our church’s picnics.  He had a lot of fun.

 

 This is a friend‘s little girl Brooklyn.  She doesn’t really speak much yet, so here she is signing “cat”.  She’s playing with the Talking Tom application on my phone.

 And now begins the Sterner East Coast Tour 2010 pictures.  For Thanksgiving this year we went to visit Kendra’s family in North Carolina, both our families in Baltimore, and then friends and touristy stuff in Philadelphia.

This is Levi playing in the airport in Nashville.  We had a layover and they blessed parents by having a playground.

 He got out a lot of energy, which was a good thing.

 Once we got to Kendra’s grandparent’s house in NC Levi discovered he loved their stairs.  It wasn’t cold there, just cool, but he spent most of his time outside on their steps, much of it without shoes on.

 We also got to meet Kendra’s new 2nd cousin’s, Isabella and Victoria.  Her cousin Carolin is their mom.

 Levi isn’t so sure about those kids.  Are they going to eat his Cheetos?

 They aren’t so sure about him either.

 Later, after the girls were napping Levi went out to throw some pine cones in the creek.

 He cleared out the yard.

 The next day he went sledding with Maw Maw and Granddaddy.  Pine needles, a plastic pan and an incline was all he needed for fun.

 Here’s a good shot of us out on the dock.  Levi wasn’t so sure about being out over the water though.

 At night we watched some of the Christmas specials that were on.

 And we even managed to get a group shot where Levi wasn’t too grumpy before we left.  He didn’t like saying goodbye, so sometimes when we left people he just wouldn’t say it.

 Levi, Aunt Janet and Granny were having fun.  Levi kept wanting to control Granny’s chair, and Granny wasn’t so sure about that idea.

 Levi then got to meet another baby, this is Isabel, my 2nd cousin, my cousin Christina’s baby.

 They chatted on the phone and seemed to do fine together.  Eventually he’ll have to get used to mommy holding another kid anyways.

 Here’s Christina watching as Levi extorts money from my Aunt Janet.  He had pockets in his pants, and the standard rule is she puts money in if that’s the case.

 Here he is showing her he has pockets in the back of his jean’s too.

 I love Levi’s look here.  He just looks so casual.  Much more like an older kid pose here.

Levi adores his cousins Liz and Laura.  Here he’s showing them his crayons.  He really liked seeing them.

 Here is Grandpa George, Grandma Lois, Uncle Kenny, Aunt Linda, me, Levi, Laura and Liz.

 Levi sure likes them.

 While in Baltimore we went to the B&O Railroad Museum.  This is a shot inside the roundhouse looking up.

 And here’s Levi next to one of the steam engines outside.

 And an outside shot of the roundhouse.  Its a very pretty building.

 This room had like a hundred train models.  He kept going around saying, “There’s a train, there’s a train, there’s a train”.   I think he said it for each one.

Of course he found the Thomas trains to play with.  Completely ignoring the real thing available to climb on and play with.

There was a huge Lego train setup for the holidays.  It was really cool.  

We also got to go on a real train ride.  That’s Aunt Sallie and Uncle Larry, who we stayed with in Baltimore riding in front of Levi and Kendra

 And a real conductor punched his ticket.  That was probably the highlight of the day for him.

 Then there was a model railroad with lots of trains.  Best part of that…it was inside a train car.

 Here’s Levi with Uncle Larry in the top of the caboose.

 Climbing down “on his own”.

 Well thairs your problem!

 Levi the train engineer.

 This is one of the little hidden things in that big Lego setup.  Buzz Lightyear landed at the airport.

 Doctor Who!  That’s a British television show if you don’t know.

 The portrait while fighting with Levi.

 Granny, Isabel and Levi, right before he took off to run around.

 Ben, Christina and Isabel.

 Some of the kids from Thanksgiving.  There were like 36 people there, so it was smaller than normal.  They were playing with a baby doll that had moving parts, so Levi really liked it.  It actually belonged to the little girl on the right, named Sophia if I remember correctly.

 Here’s the yearly kids portrait, with all of them together.

 And Levi causing disruption.

 And Levi hamming it up for our family shot.

One of my cousins, Thomas is a furry.  He wears a fur suit for various events, many of them fund raisers.  My uncle has a pool table, and Thomas wanted to get a shot of himself playing while dressed in the fur suit.  The kids were very intrigued by the outfit.

Levi saw this as double fun.  A costume and a pool stick.

 Here’s my Aunt Doris, my mom, my Aunt Janet, Uncle Larry and in the back Uncle Mel.  That’s my mom and 4 of her 7 siblings.  Uncle Kenny was at his mother in law’s Thanksgiving, Aunt Carol doesn’t go out for Thanksgiving and Uncle Jimmy lives in Texas.

Here we are at a great park we went to last time we were there in Baltimore.

 This shot may seem familiar.

 Here’s Kendra’s family with Levi not wanting his picture taken.  This is her cousin Thomas and Uncle Francis in the foreground, then Kendra, Levi, Aunt Janet and Aunt Betty.

 Here is Levi, flopped on the ground in protest.  Kendra’s aunt and uncle have a very nice house with lots of nice things that aren’t really setup for a 2 year old.  This meant he couldn’t run around like he wanted.

 This is Levi and my Uncle Bill horsing around.  We went there after Kendra’s uncle.  My Aunt Carol works with children and used to have a day care at her house, so there were lots of toys for him to play with.

 Uncle Bill was his favorite toy.

 Levi slept in an inflatable bed Uncle Larry had for his granddaughter from a long time ago.  It was pink, but we didn’t care, it was comfy and so he was happy.  Here he is conked out with his pig and the Wocket nearby.

 On our last day there Aunt Sallie made some home made play dough for Levi. 

 They had a lot of fun playing with is while we finished packing up to head to Philadelphia.  We had a great time staying with them and wish we could have stayed longer.  They are great hosts.

 We stayed with Kendra’s friend from college, Beth.  I leave most of those pictures to Kendra.  The big thing for Levi, in addition to having Beth’s kids to play with, was Sesame Place.  This is a whole theme park aimed at young kids.

 He had a ball, even though it was in the 40s outside.

 Here’s a Snuffalufagus bush.

 Our first ride, the merry go round.  This horse had some sort of crazy hair dye.

 Next was a ride that spins you around and lifts you in the air.

 Then a teacup with daddy.

 Then an Elmo live show.  Levi got a little impatient from sitting still for this.

 So we did the big slide about 20 times.

 Then back to spin around.

 In line with Beth’s kids.

 And at the big parade.  Cookie monster and some holiday dancers.

 Telly, Big Bird, Zoe and more dancers.

 Snuffaluffagus, Cookie, Zoe and someone else.

 The crew all together.

 The street sign everyone recognizes.

 And a portrait with Elmo and Cookie Monster.  I think the green screen is to allow special backgrounds, but they didn’t have it setup.  I may have to edit it myself.

 This is where we stayed in Philadelphia.  Its funny that its almost as old as my state.

 Fancy.

 Some things you have to do in Philly.  Cheesesteaks from Pats and Geno’s for comparison.  We picked Geno’s because the bread and amount of cheese was better.  The steak had a better flavor at Pats though.  We’ve heard there are better places to go, but we wanted to hit the big names in the short time we were there.

 The traditional Love sign shot, with a tree for the season.

 Independence hall is being renovated right now.  They had huge scaffolding up and then a picture of the building on the scaffolding.  It was a bit odd.

 Levi was pretty bored by the tour, so we had to tag team him.

 Here’s a more colorful picture.

 The Liberty Bell with a bored Levi.  There was a group of about 1 billion Japanese people in front of us.  Every person wanted to take a picture of every other person.  They would not get out of the way for anyone else to take a shot so we ended up having to wait almost 30 minutes.  One of them touched the bell and almost got herself tackled. 

 Out of the stroller gets a smile.

 A little blurry, but all together.

 We got half price tickets to the Academy of Natural Sciences, so we went to go see the T-Rex.  It was a big hit, except when I tried to feed Levi to it.  He didn’t like that.

 Big guy.

 He wouldn’t let me stick his head in the mouth, so I did.

 They had this cool area where they kids could dig for bones with paleontologist tools.  He loved it.

 And a treadmill where you could walk and make the dinosaur in the window walk to see how they moved.

 They had an area specifically setup for younger kids with various animals to checkout.  The bunny was a lot less threatening than a 45 foot long T-Rex.

 They also had a life animal exhibit where they showed them to the kids.  Here’s a chinchilla. 

 Levi got his own queen size bed in Philly.  He had pillows lining the bed on each side to keep him on there if he moved.

 When we got home we were back to warm weather again.  The Christmas parade for our city was the following weekend and several people were in shorts.  I had pants on because I was worried about mosquitoes.  How sad is that.

Here’s me, Mimi, Levi and Granddaddy.

 Levi loved the candy from the parade.

 He did get tired from standing so much.

 He liked the beads though.  And relaxing with Mimi.

 The pre-school at our church sang on stage this last weekend too.  Levi thought he was the star and took over the microphone.  In the second service he wouldn’t even share it.

 You could hear him really well singing.  It was really cute.  I’ll have to rescale the video I have, its pretty large right now.

That catches us up for now.  I’m sure it’ll be a little while longer again.  Having a 2 year old keeps you moving too much to take as many pictures.