Monsterduck.com

Over the Thanksgiving week, he traveled with the parents and grandparents to visit friends in New Mexico for Thanksgiving. On his way there, he stopped at Grand Canyon National Park. We purchased his "National Park Passport" which is a tourist gimmick to get you to buy a color picture stamp at each National Park you visit, before stamping the "passport" with the date at the park's visitor center.

Although I have plenty of pictures of the canyon, there's not a single photo in which I don't have some scowling expression on my face. I suppose it was just a lot brighter than I expected. In any event, here's Doyle and I at the canyon. Doyle is showing off his cuteness. I'm showing off the weight I gained during the pregnancy.

On the way out of the park, we saw a coyote in the road. We slowed down to let him cross, and then drove down the road a couple hundred feet before pulling over to take a picture, whereupon a mad scramble to get the telephoto lens began. When we looked up, we realized that the coyote was trotting toward us. He stopped about ten feet from us, waiting for his handout. We got some decent coyote photos, and he lost interest when he realized we weren't going to feed him.

In addition to seeing our friends for Thanksgiving, we did a few of the tourist-type things, such as seeing the "Miraculous" stairway in one of the churches. The story behind this stairway goes all the way back to the old west. While the church was being built, the design of the church included a choir above the entrance way, but unfortunately omitted any way to get up to it. A ladder was one of the options, but the nuns figured it wouldn't be practical for them to climb up there in their gowns. The alternative was a staircase that would switch back and forth across the entrance, but that would block the stained glass window. So the nuns prayed to the saint of carpenters for a solution. A mysterious carpenter arrived, and toiled for six months, building a spiral staircase with no center or side support, and no nails, and then left without ever leaving a bill for labor or materials. On a side note, the stairway didn't originally have rails. Those were added later on because the nuns were afraid to climb the narrow winding stairway without rails.

We also stopped drove through Madrid, New Mexico, where much of the movie Wild Hogs was filmed. The town isn't laid out the way it appears in the movie, and "Maggie's" was built for the movie, and remains in the middle of the town. Also, there was no annual chili festival, but, since everyone starting asking about the annual chili festival after the movie came out, they now have an annual chili festival. Here is a picture of James and Wally looking at the Maggie's set in the middle of Madrid.

The weather during the week was surprisingly warm, however it started snowing the day after Thanksgiving. Here is a picture of Doyle seeing his first snow.

Actually, he slept through it all.

We didn't get enough photos during Doyle's first month, so we broke down and went to the Sears Portrait studio. Doyle wasn't terribly cooperative, so we realized he has no future as a baby actor. Nonetheless a few decent shots came out. I like this photo, especially when I printed it in black and white.

Katie likes this photo, because it is probably the best photo of Doyle's face.

We took a number of photographs in Doyle's Christmas outfit, but he looked really uncomfortable, at best.

It's been a busy first month.