Christmas Parade

 This weekend was the annual Gulf Shores Christmas Parade & Beach Party. It's always fun...filled with boats riding down the road and "throws" like in a Mardi Gras parade. This year, we went to a pre-parade party at our friends' house that live within walking distance from the parade route. The littles ran around and played while the grownups enjoyed hot cocoa, coffees & conversation. Afterward, we walked down to the parade, where we met up with P&J. We enjoyed the parade, then everyone trekked down to the beach to see the camels, goats, donkeys, and geese, as well as Frosty, Rudolph, the Grinch, and the main man...Santa! There were several bounce houses & lots of beautiful lights to see. What a great time!

Closed for Christmas

 As of last night at midnight, The Monogrammed Monkey is officially closed for the holidays. Thank goodness! We are so unbelievable grateful for the business we've been blessed for this year, but stressed doesn't quite describe the way we've been feeling lately! Of course, just because we're not taking any more orders doesn't mean we're finished. As of this morning, we have 128 customers (most with multiple items) that are waiting on their orders to be finished and shipped. We keep telling ourselves to just breathe and take it one at a time!

We are looking forward to finishing everything up so we can enjoy all of the other fun things we have planned this month. Several parties, advent fun, cookies to bake, gifts to wrap, a little more shopping, and oh, yeah........2 babies to wrangle! Especially since Master Harrison is quite the adventurer. He went "missing" the other day, but we found him playing with his tub toys. In the tub.

Pile It On

Grandpa & Granny have a huge yard with lots of trees, which this time of year means lots of leaves. And so Hampton & Harrison got to enjoy one of the joys of childhood....jumping in the leaf piles! They raked them, rolled in them, squished them, and put them in their mouths (that last one was mostly Harrison). Most importantly, they had a blast being outside in the fall air!

 

North Pole Breakfast

We welcomed Telly, our elf, back this year with our annual North Pole breakfast. With special goodies like chocoalte milk and snow-covered powdered sugar to eat, we gathered around and had a little early holiday party with Telly. He's so thoughtful that he even brought the boys a couple of gifts to get them in the holiday spirit!

 

Weekend Update

This weekend was craziness! Here are a few of the things we packed in:

Our first Thanksgiving night shopping spree. Lets just say we crossed it off our bucket list & now we never have to do that again!

Bo stood for hours in line to score cheap Hangout Festival tickets.

We went to a fun birthday party for Hamp's little friend Lucas

We decorated the house (mostly)

Tanner & Randi slaved on monogramming orders

We got Hampton ready for his first day back to school in like two weeks!

Thanksgiving Day 2012

 We had a very low-key & wonderful holiday this year, celebrating at Grandpa & Granny's house. Grandi joined us (Granddaddy was in TN helping his mom put on a spread), and we had a delicious meal of Bo's smoked turkey, as well as dressing & macaroni & cheese recreated from Tanner's Grandmother's recipe. Add in all the sides & desserts made by Randi & Jan, and we had one major meal! We were all too stuffed to even have seconds...that's pretty bad on our favorite meal of the year!

We had a great time watching the parade, a tradition Tanner's family has been doing since she was little, as well as playing outside, looking through the stacks of Black Friday ads, and catching a little bit of the dog show while playing trains. We got some great photos, especially since the weather was amazing and the trees were gorgeous! Here are a few of our favorite photos. Hope everyone had as wonderful of a day as we did!

Happy Turkey Day!

"Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; His love endures forever."--Psalm 118:29