No time to craft?

Hey everyone!!  Been wanting to make some stuff but regular life keeps getting in the way?  Wish you could just set aside some time to create?  You would but the kids would interrupt you every ten minutes?  ("Ten minutes?!" you say, "try every 30 seconds!!") 

Well, I am so excited to be attending a crafting retreat at the end of June!  It is Cheryl's Rockin' Retreat and it is an entire weekend to create, chat, relax, learn or any combination thereof!  It's going to be awesome!  If you can be in the Central Texas area, how about joining us?  

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I'm even teaching an optional class and so are several other people:  Bits and Pieces: Designing to Use Your Scraps $10

Are all those pretty paper scraps landing in the trash bin?  Use them instead! 

We will make three projects while learning to use the little bits and pieces we normally throw away.  We'll also learn a basic system for organizing scraps so they are easy to save and use. 

Even if you have no idea how to start designing something to use your scraps, this fun class is for you!

Fused Glass Plate

Check it out!! I'm so excited: I made a fused glass plate! I went to a class by my friend Amanda, otherwise known as icandyartglass.com . She had the tools and supplies in her glass studio at her home and we each got to make a plate in one of two shapes. It was very fun. No two looked ANYTHING alike! Everyone chose their own color combination and totally different designs. It was pretty cool to be able to create with glass and even though it sounds intimidating, it wasn't at all.

I intentionally chose a simple design so I wouldn't disappoint myself on the execution of my idea and I was happy with it. But the fired version is sooooo much prettier than I realized it would be! I was impressed! I loooove my plate. It was hard to photograph but it is very shiny and smooth and the glass has sparkles in it that didn't show up until after firing. It's very inspiring!

Also, if you live in the Austin area, Amanda is having an artist showcase in her studio on December 2 and 3. She'll be selling her work, as will other artists in the area. I'm going to sell some of my cards - something totally new for me! I'll post details as it gets closer.

Layout: A capitol outing on a misty morning

You may remember this photo that James took this spring when he took the boys on an outing to the Texas state capitol building. I really liked the drama of the photograph, with that scraggly tree silhouette, the dark lamppost and no one else in sight!

For some reason the layout didn't photograph well - I tried it in a couple of different lights but the picture part of the layout always looked dull and blurry.  Oh well, you can see the real image in the link above if you would like to. 

I wanted to use a black and cream/kraft color scheme to highlight the image.  I chose a black background and black photo matte and then filled in the other colors from there.  I had everything designed and then added the black flourish to the background.   It reminds me of the metal work in old fashioned trim and air registers.  I really really like it - it turned out to be my favorite part of the layout!

Turtle Spotting

We rented a paddle boat on Town Lake for a fun outing with the boys this weekend.  We paddled west along the bank seeing lots of turtle families.  Sammy started out freaked out and crying but he was able to adjust and have fun.  We were really relieved since he's been scared by a wide variety of things lately. 

We all had a great time but let me share a word to the wimpy: paddling back against the wind was really hard!  We kept getting stuck and pushed backwards.  Kayaks were sailing along next to us with no trouble but our big paddle boat was not very easy to get back to the dock!

Afterward, what else but burgers at Sandy's on Barton Springs?

McKinney Falls State Park

Looking for a little day hike in the Austin area? McKinney Falls State Park is perfect for hikes, picnics and swimming.  There are also some cool activities at their nature center.  We started at the nature center, walked through the rock overhang and down to the falls.  Sammy was able to walk all the way there and back!  Doesn't he look big? 

Here was something creepy (April, skip this paragraph) - there are these fuzzy areas on the ceiling of the rock overhang.  I walked under them without thinking much about them until Zack asked James about them.  Even looking closer it seemed to be some kind of loose moss.  James held the boys up and then touched the edge of one clump.  It spread out and started pulsing, hundreds of spiders moving up and down in a loose rhythm.  We had to really look to see they were just daddy long legs, but it was nonetheless a little icky.  I just took a deep breath and walked right underneath like the boy-mom I'm supposed to be!

Overall, check out the park, it was really pleasant.

The Funky Chicken Coop Tour is Saturday!

It's that time again! Check out the FREE and very interesting Funky Chicken Coop Tour of Austin, held all over Austin on the Saturday before Easter.  It's self-guided so see a couple in your area or travel around to all of it.  We went last year and the year before - it's always great!

Enchanted Rock

What a beautiful time of year to head to Enchanted Rock!  If you haven't been it's a great central Texas outing.  We drove out there over spring break and had a really great time.  At the very beginning of the summit trail (which is short but steep!) Zack bounded up, no problem.  Sammy tried to insist on being carried.  We got him excited about walking and he went five steps before crashing and skinning one palm and the other elbow!  Still he got going again and then walked almost all of it, up and down. 

Is it always windy on the top?  I think it must be.  I've been at different times of year but it always feels like the wind will knock you over.  When we were on the steepest part I really did fear for Sammy being blown over!  We insisted he hold someone's hand - otherwise we could just see him starting to tumble down and just never stopping! 

Some tips: If you want to camp there make reservations far in advance.  If you just want to hike, get there early! We arrived at 9:30 (it's a two hour drive from Austin) and only had to wait a little but later the park was closed, only letting a car in when a car left.  As we left we counted about 120 cars waiting to get in.  Bring a flashlight if you want to explore the caves.  Finally, dress in layers - it's cooler in the wind but HOT down at the base!

At the Capitol

Check out these two boys. Their daddy took them to the Texas state capitol building to walk around and look at all sorts of things. Didn't he get a neat shot on a rainy winter morning?

Scrapbook Layout. And it's really really blue

I like this layout in person, I really do.  But every time I think about posting it, it's just so blue I bypass it in favor of something, anything, else.   So many times blue is a great choice for my photos of little boys, but it's hard to go for - give me green any day!

On this set, though, I had printed this 12x12 photo of the sky through the trees (on the left side of the layout) that I had taken on a fun family outing and it begged for some blue to complement it. I added velum to ground the smaller photos without covering too much of the very large photo or making it too busy.  Silver and clear, shiny accents completed the wintry mood (although you can tell from our shirts that the weather was more "Texas" than "winter"!). 

Most of the photos were from a trip to Boggy Creek Farm here in Austin.  It's right in the city but a fun, small farm to visit with little ones or to score some farmstand produce.  It's really fun to be reliving Sammy's almost-one-year-old days through scrapbooking!

Camping at Pedernales Falls

We had a fun overnight camping trip to Pedernales Falls State Park this weekend. The kids were thrilled to sleep in a tent and spent the late evening hours when they were supposed to be sleeping whispering to each other.  I'm glad it was so cute because they were certainly missing out on sleep!  We planed it for only one night, which really makes planning a lot easier.  And, I feel less stressed about it because even if we forget something important or don't sleep well, it's easy to handle just one night of poor sleep.

In the area where I grew up, if we went camping it was to the nearby mountains.  We lived in the desert, so of course we wouldn't camp there - too hot!  We would go to the pines where we would need a sweatshirt at night in the middle of the summer and could sit around a campfire.  Here in central Texas, there just isn't any mountain we can get to for a quick trip.  It has always seems strange to me to camp in the heat, but spring and fall are short and rainy so we end up doing summer trips just to get our camping fix.  We're getting better at it.  The trick is to go somewhere where you can play in the water. 

At Pedernales Falls State Park, there is a pretty area where you can hike down and see the falls, but to swim you need to go to another area.  We found it was a surprisingly steep hike down, but really fun once we were down there.  There was a sandy, shallow area that worked for my little ones and deeper river area where older kids were swimming.  At only a 40 minute drive from Austin, it would be a great place to go with a picnic for a day trip of water playing even. 

Our campsite worked out well for us too.  Because my husband's parents were their with their camper, we were in an area with an electrical hookup.  James (bonus husband points right here) brought an extension cord and a small but powerful fan so that we had a fan in our tent!  With the fan, the temperature was perfectly pleasant for sleeping at night - even a teensy bit chilly by early morning.  If you're looking for a nearby spot, this is a good one!

Say What?

Zack took this picture of a guinea fowl at the San Antonio Zoo this weekend. Isn't it too funny?

We had a great time on an impromptu road trip to the zoo. It seemed like it might be the last not-scorching-hot day for a long time so we wanted to make the most of it. Sammy is getting old enough to really enjoy the zoo and Zack is getting so independent!

The Natural Gardener

Do you have a garden shop you just love?

We really like to go out to The Natural Gardener in southwest Austin. They have a fabulous demonstration garden (I didn't get very good pictures of it because they closed earlier than we thought they did) full of organically grown vegetables, an herb garden, a miniature vineyard and many other beautiful areas. They also have great animals to go look at - chickens, goats and donkeys. This week we went while my mom was here and had a great time looking.

Shops like this could get me fired up about gardening. But after the initial thrill of all the pretties fades, it turns out I love visiting the shop and seeing the gardens more than the actual gardening. Good thing James will garden and I can just cook with the results.

Funky Chicken Coop Tour

We spent Saturday morning taking in the eastern half of the Funky Chicken Coop Tour of Austin. We would have loved to see all of it, but ran out of time before we had to get Sammy home for a nap. If you wanted to see a little but couldn't make the tour, you can get a little taste of it by visiting the coops and garden at the Eastside Cafe, which are open for walkthroughs. We also saw the Green Gate Farms, a CSA in east Austin. The pigs and the gigantic rooster in the top two pictures on the left are from there.

It is so neat to see people working chicken ownership into their regular neighborhood backyards. The coops don't smell and the chickens aren't noisy (though a rooster would be). They eat the eggs and enjoy watching the chickens with their funny mannerisms. The owners were so pleasant with the kids and happy to share their methods. One even gave Zack an Americauna egg (the pretty blue ones)! Maybe someday that will be us - we can dream!

Hold off a little longer, green!

That's something I never expected to say! As much as I believe the desert is beautiful, I usually put green and growing at the top of my list of what is valuable in landscape. But that was before I lived somewhere with redbud trees. These are such jewels in the already lovely landscape of Austin. They burst into bloom in the earliest part of spring and last a beautifully long time. But my favorite thing about them is the seeming determination in the way the flowers emerge directly from the trunk.

It has been more than a week since the bradford pear tree, already covered in new leaves, lost its flowers in a sudden and highly localized snowfall of white petals. I want the redbud's green to wait as long as possible before it covers the fuchsia flowers.

Star of Texas Fair and Rodeo

James took a day off work, just for a little break, and we decided to check out the Rodeo. When I was a kid in Arizona we got "Rodeo Weekend" off of school - two days at the end of February. We never actually went to the rodeo, though - we went skiing. If only that had been an option for us this year! Still, we had a fun day together.

Zack selected his own outfit and he fit right in. We alternated between a few scheduled events and the kids tent. Nothing was blow-you-away-fabulous, but it was fun. We saw the puppet show, a cow milking demonstration, the petting zoo, some of the livestock auction, some cow-herding dogs doing their contest runs and the pig races. The puppet show was just a couple of songs and a few bad jokes from a stationary puppet, but the kids liked it. We all liked the petting zoo, though we steered clear of one baby goat that was eating all the kiddies' shirts! The livestock auction was a little bewildering - we don't know much about it so we had no idea why two identical-looking cows fetched three or sixteen thousand dollars. I liked the dogs herding the cows through various spaces. It was pretty entertaining, actually! Although I have to admit the pigs were pretty cute racing, it did feel a bit surreal that I was sitting in packed stands, watching four pigs run in a circle. They even succeeded in making Zack long for a plastic pig nose for the low price of only one dollar (he didn't get it). We stopped in between things to listen to a little music, but there wasn't much going on at the time. I know there were great concerts at other times. It was neat just to walk through the livestock area and look at all the animals.

The Fair part of it was kind of an exercise in parental denial. Everything, from the rides to the food, is designed to make the kids want it (well, not just the kids). Zack wanted everything from all the food-on-a-stick to the pony rides to the Ferris wheel. Everything is purchased in tokens and the tokens are one dollar. It seemed like we could spend a ridiculous amount or spend the day saying "no" twenty times in a row. We got tired of that pretty quickly so we let Zack pick one thing to do - he chose the Ferris wheel. He was so excited. He insisted he wanted to hold his tokens in line, even though we said if he lost one he'd be stuck without enough to ride (there's a scary statement for a parent to make knowing it will be miserable to follow through!) Thankfully, he kept hold of his tokens through the entire line and I went with him - what a beautiful day! He said it was just as great as he thought it would be.
Overall, I thought it was a great family activity, and with the "pick one" approach, not too expensive. Most days there is some way to get free parking or admission or both, though we paid for our parking and partial admission (James wasn't willing to wear a pink shirt just to get in free. I did my part- I don't know what his problem was!). If you are going to do a lot of the rides, it would be a full day activity, but with the little ones we weren't. That made it just right for a half day. I think we'll be back in future years!

Game Day

As the college football season approaches the home stretch, I'm thinking about all the fun we had getting to go to a home game this season.

A couple of Saturdays ago I took Zack to his first ever University of Texas Longhorn Football game at Darrell K Royal Memorial Stadium! A momentous event, to be sure. His daddy was playing in the Alumni band, which gave us an opportunity to buy tickets. Our seats were separate from his, but we ended up getting to sit with him after all.

It was not only Alumni Band day, but also the day chosen to honor Veterans. It was also my first time to be in the stadium now that it seats over 100,000 people. I found the traditions of the game, the pregame show, and all the honoring done surprisingly emotional. It meant a lot to me that every time uniformed military personnel were shown on the jumbo-tron (even just candid shots), people cheered.

I think one reason I'm just a strident convert to UT Football (people are often surprised to learn that I didn't go to school at UT, but University of Arizona - though I'll never waver in my allegiance to U of A basketball!) is the richness and intensity of the football tradition. I love the songs, the band, the flips, the cannon shots, everything. We had a great time. Zack said his favorite thing was getting to play Daddy's trumpet at the game, but I think his first taste of cotton candy had to have been a close second!

Local Review: Extreme Fun

For the day of Zack's birthday, James stayed home from work and we chose "something fun" to do. Zack got to choose between Enchanted Rock, the Austin Zoo, the San Antonio Zoo and a bouncy place. He chose the bouncy place. The last time we were at the closer one, Goin' Bananas, I noticed signs saying the parents had to stay off the bouncers. I'm not sure if that's something they enforce, but James wanted to play with Zack, so we decided to go check out another place, Extreme Fun, in northwest Austin, near 183 and Anderson Mill.

We had a great time. There were lots of big bouncers and a foam pit, which is always great fun. By way of review, I'll say that I like the other bounce places a little better. The bouncers here were all lined up one next to one another, which seems not as interesting and fun as running through the connected rooms. Also, the toddler area is very small and empty - really just three or four toy items. At Goin' Bananas, Sammy had been enchanted with all the play kitchens and tables, but there wasn't anything like that. The price at Extreme Fun is similar to the other places. It was also quite clean - even after running around in our socks, they were clean afterward (except for the bits of foam from the foam pit). It may have been due to the timing (a weekday morning), but it was not at all crowded; in fact for a little while we were the only ones there. That makes it really easy to keep track of our kids, but Zack would have preferred kids to play with.

I think we'll be at Goin' Bananas next time, but we did have a lot of fun!

Living History

When we were reading Little House in the Big Woods, Zack started asking questions about life at that time - what they had and didn't have, how they did things, etc. James quickly looked up a local living history farm. They were making molasses that day and we had just barely enough time to visit, so we piled right into the car as quickly as possible and headed out there.

The Sauer-Beckmann Farmstead is part of the LBJ historical tour in Johnson City. They have a setup for what life was like in the early 1900's. Although Little House in the Big Woods begins in 1871, there were a lot of things that were similar. There was a food storage area at the farm with braided dried onions and garlic and smoked meats hanging from the ceiling, just as Laura and her family had in their loft. Seeing them in person and smelling the onions made what we had just read seem all the more real. We chased the chickens (sorry, chickens!), saw a day-old calf and petted the mamma cow, climbed on a wagon like they use in the book, watched the horse-powered sorghum press, felt the heat from boiling down the molasses, tasted the sweet sorgham syrup, and quizzed the period-dressed volunteers about their cooking and milk clabbering. There was a tray of homemade lye soap out and examples of clothes and toys children would have had in those times. The small workshop with all the tools reminded me of my grandad's tool shop attached to the barn at their farm in New Mexico.

It was inspiring to me to watch what was being made by hand and the kids enjoyed just running around the farmyard.

If you live in or near Austin, it's worth the drive. Check out this post from a volunteer at the farm for more information and pictures - it's a fun activity, and just enough to see with little ones without being overwhelming.

Local Review: Landa Park

We recently spent part of a day at Landa Park in New Braunfels, Tx. We highly recommend this park for families, especially the Aquatics Complex (there is a small admission fee). We had gone down to New Braunfels, a town south of Austin, for their annual Train Show. The boys really enjoyed the elaborate layouts and because it was a small show, it didn't overtax them. The admission to the show included a ride on the mini-train in Landa Park, which the boys loved. Then we spent the rest of our time (until naps were absolutely required) playing at the Aquatics Complex.

There are two things I really like about the AC. First, it has a big, spring fed pool (like Barton Springs except 72 degrees instead of 68!) with diving platforms, a giant slide, a zip line and a rope swing. I like that they haven't taken all the fun out of this area by disallowing diving, etc. I can think back to the thrill of diving into a pool and it's that pure joy feeling all over again - when was the last time you were at a pool that allowed diving? I miss it.

The second think I like about the AC is the big areas with 6 inch - 1 foot water depth. The youngest toddlers are able to splash around, not automatically in over their heads. The slides in these areas are great for the toddlers and still fun for the preschoolers. There are big mushroom waterfalls that they can run in and out of. Our kids played for the longest they've ever played at the pool and were so happy to be self-sufficient in the water.

This is the second year we've done this combination of activities and both times it has been great family times. I'd say it's totally worth the mini-road trip!

Family Vist Part 1 - Running

First, thanks very much to those who have complained about my absence in the blogosphere - it's rather nice to be missed!

It has been a good week and a busy week around here, with some not so good moments sprinkled in. The not-so-good were all related to both boys being sick with fever for five days each. It was a long time for both of them (but not the same time, we had to spread it out some) and we had to resort to breathing treatments and antibiotics for Sammy. The boys were in sad shape for a couple of days, but for sick children, they were extremely easy and even pleasant most of the time. Which was good, because the great thing about this past week was that my mom, dad and granny were visiting.

We had a great time together! We did some neat activities and projects that I'm anxious to write about, but I suspect my boys will be awake soon and I'll have to quit for today. So look for the continued reports over the next few days.

My dad has been a runner for much longer than I (and is a marathon finisher!), so I've always wanted to take him down to the Town Lake Hike and Bike Trail. This time we got in three good runs there, despite the heat. That space is such a treasure here in Austin, so it was fun to get to share it. Our first run was on Saturday, which was also July 4th, so the trail was abuzz with runners and walkers taking advantage of the long weekend. When we first pulled up to the parking area, Daddy asked if there was a race going on because of how many people were out, which made me happy and proud of this space in our city. We both like people-watching, and there is no better place to run AND watch people! We talked about how one thing we love about running is that you can just do it with minimal equipment to mess with and without having to drive anywhere... but the trail was worth driving to.

We were both inspired to more running by getting to run together.

(Image by Larry D. Moore, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License)

p.s. Daddy also brought me a copy of a book he's been really excited about - I'll let you know how it is!