Live from Fort Lauderdale

We're on our third full day in Fort Lauderdale with Mima, Papa, and Mima Pat, and so I just wanted to take some time to fill you in on some of our activities.

Tommy experienced his first trip to play in the sand at the beach (at least to his memory) and it was a great 20 minutes. Then we were rained out. But that's ok, we just got our sandy feet in the car and headed to Miami to visit the Miami Children's Museum, which was a huge hit. I think Tommy's favorite part was the Publix exhibit, where he got to put on a Publix vest (just for you, James) and play with all the plastic food. He was terrified of the giant fire truck but wound up giving the museum 2 sticky thumbs up.

We have made it a ritual to head to the "duck park" every night when we are down visiting my family. It's a great little walking park with tons of ducks (which freak me out a bit), ibis's, and coots. He has had so much fun running around chasing all the birds and playing. When he's bigger I'll tell him the story of how my friend Jamie and I were riding our bikes at that park and she wasn't paying attention and rode right into the lake. Good times.

As you may know, Tommy is completely fascinated with trains. And south Florida is full of them. So whenever we come down here he gets so excited to see "Gordon thundering by"... Gordon is one of the Thomas the Tank Engine characters, in case you aren't with it in preschool culture. So yesterday, we took him on an actual train to Islamorada Fish Company, a restaurant that's about 15 minutes from my parent's house and then back again. The whole thing took about 3 hours because we didn't realize the trains don't run very often in the middle of the day. But Tommy couldn't have been more excited.

Today we got up and went on a "sapari" to Lion Country Safari. It was really great! It rained, which actually made the animals more active. Basically the animals run loose in their designated habitats and you get to drive through the middle of them for 4 miles. It's pretty incredible and scary at times. Today we had a 3,000 pound rhinocerous running next to our car and then decide to cross the road right in front of us. We all had our blood pressure rise as we realized that he could have easily gotten spooked or angry and flipped our car. Or at least rammed into it. A few minutes later, we had to swerve to miss a zebra in the middle of the road. Very cool. And Tommy even got to ride Britney Spears-style in Dean's lap in the front seat. Not too shabby!