The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

One of the many reasons I love Christmas--and not the most important one, mind you--and yes, I do realize that we haven't even had Halloween yet--is because of the egg nog that is in abundance at that time of year and no other. I love egg nog any way you can have it: by itself, in coffee, in cake...sometimes I even shampoo with it. And guess what Walmart is already selling?

So, as far as I'm concerned, let the Christmas season begin!

(I don't really wash my hair with egg nog, by the way.)

Nine Months Old!

Today, Elyse is nine months old! It's hard to believe. It seems like just a few weeks ago that we were in the hospital getting ready for her arrival, and here she is already 75% of the way to the end of her first year.

Here are some pictures we took to commemorate this milestone:

As you can see, Elyse can stand on her own pretty well. She's not actually walking yet, but she can crawl like a pro, and we expect her to chasing after her sister--on two legs--any time now.

Rock City

On Saturday, we took a whirlwind one-day trip to visit one of my favorite places, Rock City Gardens (which Jessica remembers from our visit two years ago as the place with the "deep, dark cave that sings Mother Goose"). It's about a three hour drive from our house in Loganville, but the girls slept for most of the first two hours, until we stopped for breakfast at a Waffle House in Dalton. It was nearly noon by the time we made it to Lookout Mountain, but we were (mostly) ready for a day of fun.

Here are the girls sitting by a wall of the kind of rock formation that Rock City was named for:

And here are Anna and Elyse sitting at a table somewhere along the trail:

This is what the precipice they call Lover's Leap looks like:

(While we were there, however, no lovers leapt.)

When you first enter Mother Goose Village (the deep, dark cave that sings Mother Goose), the famous Goose herself greets you:

Among many other sights in Mother Goose Village, you will see Little Miss Muffet having the dickens scared out of her by a spider, and Humpty Dumpty, pre Great Fall:

I love Rock City, and commend anyone who visits to double the hour and a half to two hours the brochures tell you it takes to go through. Try to make your visit as long as possible, not as short, and to appreciate as much of it as you can. Remember the words of Robert M. Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when he describes the trip that the book (in part) describes:

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.

At Rock City, as is so often the case in life, you should try to make good time rather than good time. Or, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote,

Nothing can be more useful to a man [or woman, or child] than a determination not to be hurried.

Take your time, and enjoy the walk, and the view, and the company of the people you're with.

Here ends my sermon for the day.