As I look back over the past year, it seems that  Madeleine’s life has been such a whirlwind.  It feels like just a few short months ago she was a tiny, helpless, premature baby, and now she is almost a toddler who can crawl around and feed herself!  This past week has been especially  eventful.  She pulled herself up to stand for the first time, has started eating whole meals by herself, and, most importantly, had her first trip to the zoo!

We first visited the giraffes:

She loves the dogs and cat at Grandma and Grandpa’s house and enjoys watching the birds that come to our birdfeeder at home, but I think that seeing these large animals up close made her a bit nervous.  This is the look she had on her face while looking at the monkeys in the primate house:

It was somewhere between fascination and fear, and that’s how she looked pretty much the whole time.  She did enjoy some time relaxing in the shade with daddy, however.

And we took some pretty good family shots on a zebra:

By the end of the visit, she was so tired that she ended up like this in the stroller:

Maybe we’ll try a shorter visit next time!  I’ll end with a picture I took of her standing up in her crib by herself.