We had a great time at the zoo last year!

Today, Erin had her first major Big Wheel wipeout, which produced a vibrant quarter-sized scrape on her knee, but not a daunted spirit. She got a gauze pad and an extra large Band Aid. Logan was a great in trying to console her, even at his young age of 20 months. This photo shows him standing by to comfort her and love her... and probably take a sip of her tea when she's not looking.

With the holidays upon us, I thought I'd post a favorite recipe or two. This one is for Lowcountry Crab Dip -- nothing exotic, just really good. Let me know how it goes over at your next party.

Lowcountry Crab Dip

• 8 oz. cream cheese
• 6 oz. crab meat
• 2 oz. sharp cheddar cheese (finely grated)
• 1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 1 tsp. horseradish sauce
• salt & pepper to taste
• Cayenne pepper to taste if you want to give it a little kick

Preparation is pretty easy: mix all ingredients in a bowl. You're done! This goes great with most crackers, my favorites are Triscuits (I like those new little triangle shaped ones, too), Wheatstone, Captain's Wafers and even the old standard, Ritz. This makes a rather small bowl full, so you may want to use your math skills and make a bunch. Bon appetit!

I recently read that Will Smith is producing a movie called Monster Hunter. It's a comedy about a child psychologist with the ability to see the monsters that hide in kids' closets and under their beds. On his latest case, he encounters a particularly formidable opponent. Sounds interesting...hate to have that job, though.

Recently, Merritt, our 7-year-old has taken to pulling back the shower curtain before she uses the restroom in our upstairs bathroom. This drives Penny a little crazy, so she asked her why. She said, "I just wanted to make sure there was nobody in there."

Merritt -- I'm right there with you.

Occasionally, when I'm here by myself, I check closets, doors, under the bed and, yes, even behind the shower curtain, once in a while. It's funny how I've grown up my whole life like that and my fears of the bogey man still surface once in a while.

Not counting Jaws, I can only remember seeing one horror movie my whole life, He Knows You're Alone. I saw it when I was in high school in the early 1980s at Kay Meyer's house with a bunch of other folks. Bit of trivia: it was Tom Hanks' first movie...minor role.

It was about this lovelorn psycho guy that gets dumped by his fiancée, snaps and then starts killing brides-to-be all over the place -- with this big knife. There was a lot of jumping out from secret hiding places, sneaking up behind people and the like.

There was this scene (minor spoiler -- like anyone's going to see that movie these days) where this girl came home to her empty house -- or so she thought. Before it was all over, yep, her head was at the bottom of the fish tank with her neon tetras and guppies nibbling on the bottom of where her neck used to be.

Listen to me when I say this -- never ask "Is someone there?" -- just start screaming, swinging and running all at the same time. Of COURSE someone is there...or if you're wrong, the worst is that you just got a good workout.

Then there was this victim in a movie theater that the killer stabbed through the seat timed just right with a scary, screamy moment in the movie (that they were watching in the movie). I still size up folks sitting behind me in a movie theater...and lean forward a little.

Even in college, I was in the shower in my dorm room one day and I freaked out when I saw the shadow of this hand coming up over the shower curtain. You guessed it -- my own hand. Shouldn't have told my roommate, though. Next day he really scared the the fool out of me...

Then, when we were kids, my dad used to tell us stories about this John's Island Bigfoot of the Marsh sort of the creature that the locals called "Plat' Eyes" because it was supposed to have really big eyes, the size of small plates...or something. Anyway, so my younger brother, Mark, and I go out shrimping one night when we were maybe 11 and 14 respectively. We're out in the Kiawah River casting the shrimp net in the shallow water. It's dark and we've got these lights on the sides of the little boat we're in. We're scanning the marsh 20 feet away every now and then, keeping an eye out for ole' Plat' Eyes...just in case.

But Plat' Eyes was sneaky, just like in the movies -- he attacks from the rear...or so it seemed. In reality, it was a school of dolphins surfacing loudly behind us that enabled us to set the world record for the highest vertical distance ever jumped by two white kids in a boat on the Kiawah River. We later determined that we may have also set records for audio decibel levels produced by human vocal chords, but we never really called in either one, so I guess we'll never know.

Penny, Merritt, Erin and I had a great adventure recently: we went to the Coastal Carolina Fair in Ladson, SC. Nanny kept Logan for the night and we went to the fair for nearly 7 hours!? I didn't know that was possible. Here are some observations from our adventure:

• Kids can stay at the fair for almost 7 hours and still have unlimited energy.
• Pretty much all food at the fair is fried...even candybars? Who thinks of these things?
• This 44-year old man's "irrational response" to heights does not diminish with age...
• nor does the extreme disappointment in dropping a spoonful of  Dipping Dots on the ground.
• Somewhere along the way, we, as adults, lost our ability to handle the raw G-forces exerted on our bodies from even the kiddie roller coasters.
• It's best not to sit in the second row of the Elephant Encounter show -- trust me on this.
• Just because the sign says "Parents Can Also Ride," it doesn't mean that parents SHOULD also ride.
• Hand stamps are the way to go for rides, even if they do read  "Carolina Waste" in orange... on your hand... for a week.
• It's best to trust your gut when sizing up a roller coaster by watching the previous people come off the ride.
• Above all, the greatest joy the whole time is watching your kids laugh uncontrollably.

Take a look at a few more photos of our adventure here.

This was a project that I took on back in 2002. Penny and I found this old, solid poplar chest-of-drawers at Page's Thieves Market in Mt. Pleasant for $50. We had in mind to refinish it and put it in our foyer. This particular project only took a couple of weeks, most of which was stripping multiple coats of shellac, varnish, stain and at least two different paint colors from the wood.

Addendum... March 5, 2011 -- Well, the chest-of-drawers is still here! We have THREE kids now, so it is rapidly becoming moving toward looking more like an antique than it used to. Logan, our 3-year old boy loves to throw things over the rail right above it, so it's got a few character dings now. Still love it though...

We went down to the beach at around 9:30 this morning. Beautiful weather. Lots of shells. And perfect sand for building a sand castle. I had bought a $2 shovel about 3 feet long at Walmart yesterday, so that gave us a heavy duty tool to start big. We dug a nice moat about 4 feet in diameter and piled the sand in the center. Then we shaped the pile of sand into a nice base and started adding our turrets to the top with our sand buckets. Then there were the endless trips to the surf with our buckets to get water to fill our moat. Finally, we decorated with abundant shells we found laying around us. I didn't have a camera with us, but we'll build another and take a picture.

There is something so relaxing about building a sand castle. I don't know why really, but I suspect it is because there is no lumber math involved... there are no plans... and it's very loose and flowing, like a 3-D sketch of something. It is built with by eye and whim, and not so much the brain. You can change your mind in an instant and add a bridge, wipe out a section and rebuild it -- and it doesn't really matter.

After we finished our sandcastle, I swam a bit with Merritt and let Erin play with Anna in the sand. When I came back, I picked up the shovel and just started digging a hole in the sand. I had the thought, "I wonder how deep I could dig a hole with this little 3' shovel?" Well, Erin came over and asked what I was doing. She wanted to know why I was digging a hole and didn't seem satisfied with the answer, "I'm just digging a hole." She asked, "What are you going to put in the hole?" I stuck with, "Nothing, I'm just digging a hole." By this time, she wanted to buy in to my mission of hole digging and began helping. I don't really know how deep we could have dug our hole in the sand, but we stopped digging at around 4 feet. When Erin got in the hole, the surface was about even with the top of her head.

It was a great morning...

We are at our annual vacation here at Surfside Beach, SC, where Penny's folks graciously give us a week every year. It's only two hours away, but we are transported body, mind and spirit, every year we come here. I think it's the... intentionality of it all. We drove up yesterday morning with our Odyssey van (a white one and, yes, we DO always have fun trying to find it in the Walmart parking lot). The van was packed flush with the windows, as was the borrowed cartop carrier, but we were determined to drive only one car this year -- especially with gas prices at $4 a gallon.

We arrived, unpacked and went down to the beach immediately -- the weather was perfect. The salt air, the smell of the 1950's vintage beach house, the sound of the surf and the feel of sand between our toes -- all are stimulants to our senses and to our memories of the past 11 years that we have spent here as a family and even longer for Penny, who has been coming here since her childhood.

Every year, on the last day of the trip, we go to the Arcade at nearby Garden City and after a few hours of pinball, skeeball and rides, we have our photos taken in an old Fotomat booth at the Arcade. After 3 minutes, it magically spits out a strip of 4 black and white memories of another year on vacation. Last year, for our ten year anniversary, I scanned and created a collage of our 10 years worth of Fotomat pictures.