Catching Up - Baby's First Thanksgiving

It has been a busy few weeks and will remain busy through the end of the year, but I finally think I have a bit of time to try to recreate some of our adventures. They started with Ripley's first Thanksgiving. We have some wonderful holiday traditions that we were so excited about sharing with little girl.

Things started with the trip north on 95. Usually a 2 1/2 hour trip, we know it is going to take longer on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but we were able to leave around 3:30 and pretty quickly made our way through Maryland, only to come to a screeching halt in Delaware. For those of you who do not travel this stretch of road, 12 miles of I-95 are in Delaware. Doesn't seem like so much, but this 12 miles took us 1 1/2 hours to traverse. Once in Jersey, things were fine again and we were there by 7:30 or so.

A wonderful Thanksgiving Thursday with good food and good company. Uncle Tom came over from Detroit. Matt, Christine and Deirdre joined us. But we did miss Uncle Culann and Aunt Carolyn who went up to Michigan this year. And Chuck was laid low upstairs with a stomach virus. I am glad Ripley will be too small to remember they weren't there - and we hope that we'll get back on track next year! Daddy took time away from carving the turkey to handout with ittle girl in her pretty dress.

Little girl got us up early on Friday, so it made sense to hit a Black Friday sale (for the first time) - to replace our camera which was taking way too many blurry photos. After a nice brunch, Chad, Ripley and I headed to Cape May, where we stayed at Congress Hall, a super cool historic hotel. We walked along the beach, did some shopping, played some skee ball at the local arcade, and ate dinner at our usual - Stumpos. We made it an early night, put baby to bed and followed in the tradition of watching a movie by watching Hancock (much better than we thought it was going to be).

On Saturday, we took our time and headed to the Cape May - Lewes Ferry to begin the ride home. It was baby's first boat ride and she had a wonderful time looking out the window at the ocean. We look forward to many many more Thanksgiving adventures.