Small Milestones

Maggie and I stayed home from church today since she's getting over a cold. I was doing a load of laundry when she walked into the hallway with her fancy shoes on - which she had put on by herself! To my knowledge this is the first time she has put on her shoes without any assistance, so we celebrated with a photo and and extra glass of milk. :-)

Maggie's Got a Star!

When we arrived home from our fall vacation, we found a special letter waiting for us from the hospital where Maggie was born. Their nursery features a huge mural covered with gold stars. Every year the hospital auxillary randomly selects 12 babies to put on the stars - one for each month. Maggie's name was drawn out of the over 80 babies born in January 2006 at that hospital! So today we took a little drive to see Maggie's star and had lots of fun reliving memories from almost 2 years ago! I'm so excited to have her name there and to think that she'll be able to come back years from now and find her name on that wall.

Maggie's star highlighted:

Daddy helps Maggie find her star:

Maggie's a SuperStar!

Family Fest

Our church has an annual Family Fest on Oct 31 and for the first time they moved it indoors. Somehow I got asked to coordinate the decorations for the event, so I called on some good friends to help. Lori arranged for hay and mums, which I used to create some displays like this:

Joy got a great team of ladies together before the event to make some fun decorations for the insides of the building - these sunflowers and pumpkins were fabulous!

Dottie put together a wonderful photo area which was just beautiful!

Thanks to everyone to helped on these teams. . . Mike, Jennie, Toni, Nancy, Holly, Lori Ba., Susan, Toy, Myra, Rachel, Dee Ann, and anyone else I've missed! You're such a blessing!

Scarecrows!

Our local Garden is having their annual scarecrow contest so our playgroup went for a visit. We had a fun time exploring with the kids.

Maggie's friend Will was there and they were so cute! They held hands through the Rose Garden and Maggie led the way. I guess she's not the submissive type. haha. They also enjoyed looking at the fountain. . .

Maggie B, Superstar!

It's official - daddy's a sucker for his little girl. We walked past these sunglasses in Wal-mart and Maggie tried them on and that was all she wrote.

Fall Vacation '07

Well, it's that time of year again! Each fall we like to go visit my parents in Western North Carolina to see the beautiful fall color in the mountains. This year we began our trip by visiting Florence and had fun visiting with friends.

We took Maggie to the park we used to frequent. She loved swinging!

We had a fun visit with Daniel and Abbe and their sweet kids! We also got to attend the wedding of a friend from church and see many of our Woodmont friends at the reception.

Then it was off to NC!

Maggie had fun visiting with Grammy and Grumpa (pictured here). Grammy has a broken arm unfortunately so we had to limit our play a little bit but we still had fun. The weather was kind of rainy most of the trip, but we managed to get out some!

One of the best places to see color is at "Max Patch". There's a huge field on the top of a mountain surrounded by trees. Maggie could just roam around - she loved it!

My dad took Ben on a wonderful hike up to the top of a Lynn Lowry, a mountain named after a teenage girl who died from leukemia. She loved these mountains so much that her parents bought the top of the mountain, erected a huge cross and put lights on it. At night you can see this cross for miles up in the sky! It's a difficult hike to make it to the top of this mountain but Dad and Ben had fun hiking it. (that's Ben at the bottom of that picture . . . see? Huge cross. . . )

Our last day in NC it really cleared up and got beautiful so we spent some time just relaxing in the yard - it was fun to let Maggie run around and explore.

We ended our vacation by going through Opelika to see Ben's family. Ben was fortunate enough to get tickets to Saturday's game from a friend (War Eagle!) but for Maggie's first introduction to Auburn, we decided to take it easy. So we took her to campus early in the day and just walked around.

The End! :-)

Today was one of the first cool days of the fall . . . and by cool I mean not stifling. :-) So we decided to take advantage of something a friend had told us about and we got a season pass at the local garden. This was the first time for us to go during the day - we usually only go at Christmas to see the lights. Maggie loved it! She loved getting to walk around and look at the plants.

We spent several minutes just wandering around the rose garden. Ben was showing her how to sniff the flowers, but she couldn't quite get it. She kept blowing instead. It was so funny - she would walk up to a flower and ::ffhhhh:: into the rose.

As we wandered around the Garden I couldn't help but reflect on what a difference Maggie made in our experience. As we followed her through the different gardens, we would linger here and there, get excited over things like bugs and beetles and butterflies. We looked longer at some flowers and sat down on the ground to watch and wait. It took us 15 minutes to get through the rose garden when it usually takes us 30 seconds. I enjoyed the new perspective and look forward to many more trips where we can linger in different areas.

My favorite part of the garden was the butterfly area - there were SO many butterflies! I could have sat and watched them for an hour. But I think Maggie was frustrated at not being able to touch one -they kept flying away every time she got close -imagine that!

Our happy girl!

After we got through in the Garden we had a picnic lunch which included a new experience for Maggie - a "juicebox" of milk. (Does that make it a milkbox? I don't know). Maggie was very excited about this and got the hang of it pretty quickly. She still has to master the technique but it was pretty fun to watch.