Mina and Maggie demolish a Jenga tower

Maggie and her cousin demolish a Jenga tower during Thanksgiving.

Christmas Lights at Bellingrath!

One of our Christmas traditions here is visiting Bellingrath Gardens to see the Christmas lights!

This was one of Ben's favorite displays, the Chinese Gardens:

We used this opportunity to get a rare family photo:

Standing

Maggie hasn't yet demonstrated her new skills for us, but when we aren't around, she will occaisionally pull up.

Does the fact that I'm taking a picture while my daughter is crying make me a bad mother? ;-)

Thanksgiving

We were very thankful this year to have a bunch of our family here for the holidays. My parents came down a week early and so Maggie got to spend a lot of time with "Grammy and Grumpa" which was much needed!




Maggie really started working on her new crawling skills - getting into everything. We now have "Maggie cabinets" in the kitchen in bathroom with things that are safe for her to play with hidden in them. She LOVES playing in those cabinets!


We took the opportunity to do some exploring of the area while my folks were here and visited Dauphin Island, which had been damaged pretty extensively during Hurricane Katrina. There is a lot of rebuilding going on, and it really is a pretty spot - even though it was quite cold and windy (for the gulf).





Of course our family get together wouldn't be complete without the cousins getting in the tub together. This was Maggie's transition to our "big tub" - she's been using the little counter-top version at our house all this time. My back likes the little tub on the counter much better, but with Maggie's new mobility, this is a better option and she LOVES crawling around in the huge tub!


We did some MORE exploring and visited the local zoo which was quite interesting. It's way out in the boondocks and by the time we drove down the dirt rut, I mean road, we really weren't sure what we were about to find, but it was GREAT for the kids! We were greeted by a young pig who followed us around the whole zoo. They had bears and monkeys and lots of tigers and all kinds of other animals and you could feed the animals peanuts though these tubes which was great fun for the kids! It ain't the San Diego zoo, but it was a lot of fun!