Noxubee Again...

I was sitting around Saturday morning while Ethan was gone doing something for school and I pulled out the newspaper to see what was going on around here. I noticed an ad for a free canoeing activity out at the Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge. It said they'd provide everything we'd need, all we had to do was show up. As soon as Ethan walked in the door I grabbed him and the baby and we headed out. We were worried about having to stand in line with everyone else in town to get into the canoes, but it turned out not to be a problem. There was a home football game that day and so most of the town was too busy with that to know that anything else in the world even existed. We drove through campus on our way out of town just to see all the people.
The tailgating here starts the day before the game and doesn't end until the game does. There are people everywhere!

When we got to Noxubee we were headed around the end of the lake towards the western shore where the boats were waiting when Ethan noticed this little guy hanging out on the eastern shore of the lake. It's hard to tell exactly how big this guy is with the way his tail is curled to the side, but we decided that he's atleast 8 feet long and probably more than that. My mom didn't appreciate my excited phone call to tell her we were looking at a gator, mostly because I followed that bit of info with the fact that we were getting ready to take her first grandson out onto the same lake in a canoe. Apparently she was a bit unsettled the rest of the day. :) The canoeing was a blast. We were worried they wouldn't let us take Erik out, but they didn't have any problem with it. We put his car seat in the bottom of the boat and away we went. The cypress trees are changing color for the fall and they were all really pretty.

We were paddling along when all the sudden Ethan says, "what's this thing?". I look down in the water and inches from my hand I see this grayish brown scaly thing and I completely freak out! My first thought is that it's an alligator, then when I realize it's not one I think it's a huge snake. Ethan's trying to pull the thing out of the water with his paddle to get a look at it and all I can think is how mad he must be making the thing and that we're all going to flip into the water and get eaten by something. I turned out to be a plant of some kind. Once I finally calmed down again, it was kind of interesting to look at. We saw lots of Great Blue Herons and Snowy Egrets and all sorts of other waterfowl. There were turtles that would poke their heads out and watch us go by. It was all really beautiful and I wish I'd remembered sunscreen so we could've stayed out there longer. As always with our adventures, Erik slept through the whole thing. Someday he'll be so sad that he missed all this!

Pumpkin Palooza

Friday night we went to the Pumpkin Palooza. It's a city Halloween party that they have every year here. They block off a section of main street and have all kinds of fun. Kids can get all dressed up and go trick or treating to all the businesses on the street. You can buy a pumpkin and decorate it with all kinds of fun things. It's just a really fun evening for everyone.

We scrounged around and came up with a costume for Erik. He wasn't too inpressed with it all but everyone thought he was pretty cute.

One fun thing was the manequins in all the shop windows. Don't they look so life-like?These girls are from the fashion department at the University here. They were in all the clothes stores and it was really fun to see. They did an awesome job looking like manequins. In fact, there was one store that had some of the models in it and some actual manequins and it was really hard to tell the difference. We had a really good time just wandering around watching the crowd and seeing what all the little shops had to offer......Erik did get a little tired of the whole thing though and decided to call it quits.

Tupelo

Due to the crazy food prices around here, Ethan and I have joined Sam's Club and make a monthly pilgrimige to Tupelo to do our grocery shopping. It's an hour drive but it's a pretty one. My favorite thing about it is that there are lots of wide open spaces, at least they're wide open for Mississippi. There are lots of farms along the way and it's so nice to be able to look out over the fields and not have to just stare at the trees flashing by. Once you get to Tupelo though, you are back into the trees. In fact you can hardly see the town for the trees. This picture was taken right off the exit into downtown Tupelo.

So here's a bit of trivia. Did you know that Elvis was born in Tupelo Mississippi? We saw signs advertising his birthplace so we went to check it out. It was a fun little detour, but nothing too exciting.

This is possibly the same kind of car that the Presley family used to move from Tupelo to Memphis. It may have been a different car, but they weren't sure so they picked this one for display outside the museum.

We could have toured the inside of the house, but somehow we didn't think it was big enough to hold $12/person worth of intrest.

I don't know though, maybe Ethan wishes I weren't so cheap...

Did you know that not only could he sing, play the guitar, and star in movies, but Elvis was also a great babysitter!! :)

Not only did we miss out on the tour of the house, but for an extra $3 we could've gone inside Elvis's childhood church and sat through a fake church service modeled after the ones he would have attended. They put on these fake services every 15 minutes every day.

Maybe I wasn't willing to pay three bucks to go to Elvis's church, but I might've thought about it if that had included the use of his out house...

More of Erik

So here's a few more pictures for you. Erik has been smiling for real for a few weeks now, but he doesn't like the camera so I've had a hard time getting a picture of it. He was super happy this morning though, and not even the camera could wipe the smiles off his face.

Erik's biggest goal right now is mastering hand control. He wants so badly to be able to get those yummy fingers into his mouth to suck on! He'll work and work and get them in there, and then get excited, wave his arms around, and then have to start all over again. We were in JoAnn's looking for a halloween costume pattern for Erik. He wasn't too thrilled with the whole thing. He started fussing the minute we walked in the door and stopped shortly after we walked out. I guess Ethan's dislike of this type of store is genetic.

This is the look the camera normally gets...

I love this one. You can kinda see how blue his eyes have turned. His hair is also getting pretty light. We think he may end up being blond like me.

Just recently, Erik has started rolling from his tummy to his back. It still kind of surprises him every time he does it.

Waverly Trip

Saturday we decided to go on an adventure. I've been looking around online for interesting things for us to do around here and found a little bit of information abour a historical sight I was really interested in. We loaded up into the car and headed out for West Point, Mississippi. West Point is a small town about half and hour's drive north of us. It's where we go to church on Sunday. About ten miles outside of West Point is the Tennessee/Tom Bigbee waterway. It's a huge river that is a major shipping line. It connects a large area of Eastern Mississippi and the surrounding states with the Mississippi river. I know it doesn't look amazingly huge in this picture, but I'm pretty sure that what looks like the other shore is actually an island in the middle of the river. By the time we got that far, Erik was hungry, so we found a little picnic area on the river banks and I sat in some shade to feed him while Ethan went exploring and picture taking.

When Erik was finally full, we backtracked a short ways back up the road we were on to get to our main objective for the day, which was the Waverly Plantation Mansion. Waverly was built in 1852 by the Young family. In its hayday it sat on 50,000 acres of rich river bottom land and was one of the biggest plantations in the south. It had its own cotton gin, brick kiln, lumber mill, leather tannery, and hat manufacturing operation. It is thought to be the first place in America where saddle blankets were commercially manufactured. It was home to the Youngs, with their 10 children, as well as hundreds of slaves, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers. Around 1913 it was left vacant by the family, who couldn't agree what to do with the house after the last of the 10 children passed away. It sat there empty and unused until the 60's, when a family of antique dealers heard a story of a beautiful old house sitting abandoned in the woods and they went and foud it and bought it. They'be been living in it and restoring it over the last 50 years and have done a beautiful job. While they were unable to get any of the original furnishings, they've filled it with period pieces from their family antique collection, using photos of the house's original decorations and furnishing to get it as close as possible to the original set up.

This was Erik's first time in the baby pack, and I think he really liked it. We're standing just inside the front gate getting ready to head up the walkway to the house.

Taking pictures of the inside of the house is technically against the rules, so I can't show you the true magnificence of the house. It was INCREDIBLE! You walk in the front entry hall and it's open all the way to the cupola above the third floor. There are huge gold plated mirrors(some of the few pieces in the house when the new owners moved in) that hang on either side making it all seem even bigger than it is. The first two floors each have four rooms on them, one room in each corner of the house. On the ground floor you have the sitting room, parlor, dining room, and master bedroom. On the second floor are four bedrooms.

Erik was a huge hit with the woman giving us our tour (she's the daughter of the couple who bought the house and has lived in it since childhood), and she gave us permission to take his picture on the bed in the master bedroom. Aparently this is a traditional place for every baby in their family to have their pictures taken.

The bedspread on the bed was exquisite and is just a small example of the quality of the furnishings and decorations in the house. It was handknitted, and the woman who made it started it as a teenager and finished it as a great granmother. Erik wasn't too happy about being woken up and taken out of his carrier for the pictures.

After we'd seen all the rooms on the first floor, the tour guide sent us up to the second floor on our own. As we were heading up the stairs, she said we could take pictures from the balcony. She didn't specify whether the camera had to be looking outside or not, so we did both.:) This is looking down into the grand entry hall, towards the back door. The light fixture is original to the house. All the original light fixtures are still there. In fact, despite having been abandoned for so long, the house was in great shape. Three huge gold plated mirrors still hung on the walls unbroken. Almost all of the glass was intact; the outside windows, and the glass in several display cases and china cabinets that were built into the different rooms. All the doors were still there with their original knobs. Every room had its own fireplace, complete with the original italian marble mantles. All the hand carved spindles on the stair and balcony rails were still there.

Here's looking up past the third floor into the cupola.

The doors on either side go into the four bedrooms. Every room in the house has a walk in closet so big the current owners were able to turn some of them into full modern bathrooms. Every room also has a door out onto a balcony or porch.

This is the view off the balcony back toward the main gate. Visitors aren't allowed past the second floor, so that's all the pictures we got of the house. After touring the house we wandered the gardens for a while. They were sure pretty!

We thought the pond was pretty. The murky green water was a surprisingly good reflector and it made for some pretty pictures.

While Ethan was taking pictures of the pond, I was looking around at the plants and happened to notice what turned out to be Ethan's favorite part of the day.

Ethan loves frogs and would love to have one as a pet, but they're not allowed in our apartment. Otherwise I think this little guy would have found himself living in a new home.