Thanksgiving at Lake Murray

After our trip to the ob/gyn on Wednesday morning, we swung back through West Ashley to pick up Gemma (she was having a blast playing with Noah and Liam at their house) and then we headed up to Cy's parents' brand new house on Lake Murray (near Lexington, SC) for Thanksgiving.  The new house is gorgeous - it is full of windows and light and you can see the lake almost everywhere you look.

For example,  here is the living room:

And this was by far Gemma's favorite spot in the house: the huge screened-in porch.

She got very upset any time we made her come back in, even when it was really cold out and her poor little nose was all red.  She didn't care; all she wanted to do was play on the porch!

Anyway, we got there around lunchtime on Wednesday.  We took a tour and then spent most of the day in the kitchen, preparing for the big Thanksgiving meal the next day.  I made a pumpkin pie with homemade crust:

And hummus deviled eggs:

I had never made them before but they were super delicious!  I also made corn spoonbread (which I neglected to take a picture of), and ended up making and helping out with quite a few other things on Thanksgiving Day.  (There was a ton of food!)
 
This is the view we woke up to on Thanksgiving morning, a very nice start to our day:

Again, we spent most of the day in the kitchen getting ready.  Then late that afternoon, Wes, Kelly, Noah, Liam, and Uncle Mike and Aunt Jean arrived.  We enjoyed a very delicious Thanksgiving dinner together.  Then, after dinner, chaos ensued, as is typical with three little ones.  They had so much fun together the whole time we were there, and I was really impressed by how well they played together.

We also *attempted* to take some family photos on Thanksgiving (it didn't work out terribly well):

The day after Thanksgiving, we headed out early in the morning for a trip to the zoo.  It was really nice - the weather felt great and the zoo was not very crowded.  The kiddos seemed to enjoy it - Noah got to see a cool 3D dinosaur movie, and they all rode the carousel:

(Gemma actually didn't enjoy the carousel as much as it appears - I found out later that Cy was tickling her just so that she would be smiling for a picture!)

And of course we saw some animals (real, stone, stuffed, you name it).  Gemma's favorite animal seemed to be the ostriches for some reason.  I thought she was going to crawl through the fence to try to climb on one of them or something.  Then, when we were ready to move on, she kept running back over to them - I finally had to pick her up and carry her off so we didn't get left behind.

Gemma saw this elephant in the gift shop and latched on to it.  She has been dragging it everywhere ever since.

I was way too excited about this flamingo tree.  Thank goodness I have a flamingo tree of my very own already.

We enjoyed our Thanksgiving lake/zoo trip very much.  We headed back home yesterday morning, but before we left, I had a chance to walk out early that morning and snap a few photos of one last beautiful lake sunrise: