First trip to the zoo!

A couple of weekends ago we took Maddie for her first trip to the zoo. The Asheboro Zoo is split up into 2 parts- North America and Africa. It's a very spread out zoo, so we decided to do Africa in the morning and then see what happened after lunch. It was the end of April, but the high was over 90 degrees that day! So needless to say, we got moving early and were at the zoo (about 2 hours away) a little before 10.

There were lots of animals out, and the zoo wasn't too crowded, so that was nice. However, Maddie didn't care a thing about looking at the animals. She thought the viewing machines were extra cool though- she wanted to eat them, which is high praise in Maddie's book. She also enjoyed looking around at all the people. We were amazed at how well behaved she was, b/c we were strapping her in and out of her stroller every 5 minutes, and she skipped her morning nap.

After we were done looking through Africa, we met up with some friends and their babies for a picnic lunch just outside the zoo gates, and it was a lot of fun! There were scary geese trying to get our food, and those suckers were aggressive, but we managed to keep them from eating Maddie.

We headed back into the park after lunch with the intentions of taking a tram over to the North America side to see the polar bears, but the tram line was at least 50 people deep. The walk to the other side was estimated at 40 minutes, and Maddie had already passed out asleep in her stroller, so we decided Africa was probably enough for her first visit and headed out. I can't wait for next year when she will be excited to see all the animals!

National Champs 2009!

I think we know who the Tarheels really have to thank for their phenomenal season. I'm just sayin'....Maddie was born, then they had an awesome year. We're waiting on our thank you card, Mr. Hansbrough.

Bow ties are better than chocolate

Maddie had a fun first Easter. We went to church, where she continued her usual pattern of hating being left in the nursery. This time we were not "beeped" to come check on her, but it turns out they tried and our beeper just didn't work. Poor Mads. She is just not too sure about this nursery thing.

The week before Easter we attended an Easter Egg Hunt (Maddie was just SO excited to look for Easter eggs), mainly for the photo ops. What good is a baby if you can't take lots of silly pictures that they won't remember? We had fun though, it was a nice day and Maddie was very well behaved. Here are some of my faves:

I'm ready for some fun Dad!

Rockstar

Hey look, I found an egg all by myself. With no
help from my parents at all.
This bunny thing is kinda creepy looking- guess
I'll just taste his bow tie.
Easter is fun!!!

Sitting up!

I think the last time I posted, I was lamenting about Maddie still not sitting up. Of course, as soon as I wrote that, she started sitting a few days later. I guess maybe she reads the blog and wanted to prove me wrong. Here's her first official sitting picture, when she was a few days shy of 8 months:


It's taken her a while, but now at 9 months she's a pretty good sitter. She was still tipping over quite a bit for that first month, but she's getting the hang of balancing now. Although we do still usually have a pillow behind her, just in case!

Now that Maddie is sitting well, she's graduated to a "big girl" bathub (it even quacks!) and a portable high chair that is great for when we're eating out. She loves her new bathtub and also loves sitting right at the table with her mom and dad.

I won't lie though, I miss those days when we'd take her in her carseat and she'd fall asleep mid-meal. Or if she got hungry, I could just feed her a bottle and be done. Now she wants to be entertained and gets quite indignant if we even think about eating our food without sharing some with her. This girl LOVES to eat! (I swear she isn't drunk in this pic)

So we've conquered sitting, and although she was on the late side, she was still in the normal range. I'm really enjoying having a sitting, but non-mobile baby. I know that crawling, standing and cruising are coming up, but I'm in no hurry!

WAY behind!

Once again, I find myself behind in my attempts to blog all our latest happenings. So instead of doing one big mega post, I'm going to try and do a few posts to catch up on the last few weeks. Here goes!