Happy Thanksgiving! (belatedly)

Once again I have to apologize for the length of time between posts! This time, though, I can't blame illness - I dropped and broke our camera chasing Maisie around Underwater Adventures, the aquarium at the Mall of America. So as a result, I have no pictures to share of our lovely Thanksgiving, which included a trip to Iowa to meet baby Maya. But if someone has some and can email them to me (hint hint Clare!) then I'd be happy to share them here.

But we went shopping the day after Thanksgiving and picked up a lovely new camera at Best Buy. (We also got the extended insurance plan that covers accidental damage, say for instance if it were dropped.) So I do have pictures from our trip to the Minnesota Zoo today!

One of the highlights, for Maisie, of a trip to the zoo is always sitting on this giant metal tortoise. It can be hard to get her off the metal tortoise to go see the actual, real animals sometimes!

You may notice that Maisie has another orange hat on! She got this pumpkin hat as a birthday present from her grandma Jo, who made it for her. Since it's too cold out for her other orange hat, she's now taken to this one as her constant headwear. She gets lots of compliments on it!

After walking around for a while, we sat by the gibbons' enclosure and had a snack. I learned today that one of the differences between monkeys and apes is that monkeys have tails, whereas apes do not. So there is a fun animal science fact for you!

We ended our zoo day at Discovery Bay, which houses the aquatic animals. There's a giant aquarium with all kinds of interesting fish (and sharks!), a tidal touch pool that Maisie loves to splash in, and a dolphin tank. Maisie enjoyed watching the dolphins swim around.

Normally there are dolphin shows, but one of the dolphins turned up pregnant, so all shows are cancelled until some time after she gives birth. But in the meantime, we still like to watch them swim around and play together.