That sounds like the title of a children’s book, doesn’t it?

Amanda was kind enough to let us borrow Milly this morning in lieu of her going to church, despite the fact that she hasn’t been since her baptism a couple weeks ago.

(For the record, I did ask her if she wanted to go last week, but she said she got kinda bored outside of reading and drawing. I found that hard to believe since Treasure Island, the church service she goes to at Port City Comunity Church, is like a kid’s show on TV, or at least the service part is.)

Anyway, Tristen and I picked Milly up at Lifepoint Church, where Amanda goes on the weeks she doesn’t have Milly and took a trip down to the NC Aquarium at Fort Fisher. Milly spent most of the drive with her nose in a Boxcar Children book.

The reason we decided to take an extra special trip to the Aquarium was that there was a bit going on there today. The Cape Fear Festival of the Trees was held there, for one thing. It’s where a bunch of sponsors decorate a ton of trees that are then set up all over the place. Another kind of big deal is that Laura was diving in the tank today, dressed up as an elf and accompanying a diving Santa. There was also a room full of fake snow that kids could play in, which was a lot of fun. Santa was there too, and Milly sat on his lap and talked to him even though she had also visited the Santa at Airlie last week. (She told the previous one a joke, just to mix things up a bit for him.)

The coolest thing, though, was that they had two live penguins you could pet. I always figured penguins felt a bit oily, but they were actually very soft. I laer pointed out to Milly that I didn’t know anyone who had ever had the chance to pet a penguin before, and I’d never done it until then in my nearly-40 years.

Amanda and Jason were doing a bit of running around and grabbing lunch, so instead of taking Milly back to her mom’s, we took her home and had about enough time to feed her most of some lunch before they came by the house to pick her up. Amanda had offered to let me keep Milly until later in the afternoon, but Steven was planning to come out and help fix up the electricity in the back of the house, which hasn’t been properly hooked up since we installed the sliding glass door in the back. He ended up having to cancel though.

We didn’t do a whole lot the rest of the day, mostly watched football. The Panthers played the Packers and won 31-24. The Patriots took on the Steelers a little later. Tristen doesn’t like either team and couldn’t decide who to root for. I picked the Patriots just for fun, in part because I feel like there are so many Steelers fans everywhere you go. It was a ridiculously good game, complete with a controversial ending.

Basically, the Steelers were down 27-24 and ran in a touchdown with a few seconds remaining in the game. The football crossed the line, but it wobbled a bit when the guy landed, so they said he didn’t have control of the ball and it was ruled incomplete. I’m no football scholar, but I thought as long as it crossed the line while the player had the ball, it was good. That was the first down though, so the Steelers had a few more tried. Unfortunately for them though, Ben Roethlisburger threw an interception on the third down with five seconds left in the game, and that was all she wrote.