Hail, Pony Rides, Curling Fun, etc...

Here's what we've been up to this past week.


We had a whopper of a hail storm on Wed. The biggest hail was over 2" in diameter. It was crazy. I'm taking the car in tomorrow to get the damage assessed. I've heard from several people with seemingly less damage than our car sustained that their vehicles have been totaled. Hmmm, not sure how I feel about that. Right now we're looking at a cracked windshield, cracked tail light, and umpteen million dents ALL OVER the car. We shall see, we shall see...


The crazy weather popped a little surprise rainstorm into our day Friday as well. We were supposed to head to a park for a book fair and dig in the sand to find dinosaur bones, all followed by a picnic lunch. All of which got rained out. We ended up splashing in puddles outside instead. It was messy and fun!


And the crazy weather lasted into Saturday - it was quite cool yesterday, only in the 30's in the morning. But the sun was shining and it warmed up enough to take the boys up to the Cedar Park Heritage festival. Ben & Alex enjoyed their first pony ride. No, I didn't have the camera. There was also a little petting zoo for the kids with goats, ponies, ducks, chickens, rabbits, and a few other farm animals that I can't think of. Alex watched some older kids chase the ducks and laughed hysterically at the antics. Ben made a dash for the goats and loved petting them. I think he was so interested because of the ones up the street that we feed so often. Anyway, the festival was fun and the boys enjoyed it.


Today was gorgeous and sadly it was my last day of curling for the season. I've got the Texas Open Bonspiel coming up in April (although that might actually get cancelled... more on that if it happens). The last 3 weeks were the league playoffs/championship. My team actually won! IT was a hard fought battle and some really tough games but last Sunday we played amazingly well and won the championship for the season. Today was the 2nd Lonestar Curling Club Weirdspiel. Just a fun little competition. Teams are chosen at random and we play a series of really short games. Well, my team won todays weirdspiel as well. So, coupled with my weirdspiel win in Dec. that makes me 3-0 for the season!!! I love curling :-) Enough about the games though, the club had a big picnic at Zilker after curling today. Mike brought the boys down, they ate, we all played and just about the time the food was cooked and ready to eat we had to bail because the boys were tired. That's a huge disappointment because Uly was the grill man today and he can really cook. The real kicker is that Mike and I didn't get lunch at all, the timing was just off. Oh well, at least we had a good dinner.


Not sure what fun things we will do this week, but we never fail to find ways to keep busy during the day. I know that my evenings will be filled with taxes for at least a couple of days! Cross your fingers, maybe we'll get a big refund!

This One's for you Grandma!!!

Pink Plastic Curlers - need I say more??!!

OK, so yesterday was toddler pottery in the park. The good news was that it was tons of fun, Alex and Ben LOVED it and it was a gorgeous day to be doing outside artwork. The bad news, apparently not too many of the other people that said they were going to come actually came. In fact only 3 other people (out of 13) came. Well, poo on them! It's a bit irksome that I bothered to plan this, get supplies, set everything up and then have no one show up. Well, at least Alex and Ben had fun!

What do pink plastic curlers have to do with all of this? Well, I picked some up at the dollar store thinking they might work in making cool patterns in the clay. Sure enough, they did and it was probably the most popular and easiest tool to use!

Grandma, I was thinking about you and all of your plastic curlers the whole time we were playing in the clay!

This, That, and the Other!

Here again I am writing another totally random update. Really I'm hiding at the moment (everyone is quiet so I'm sneaking away), shame on me :-) A belated happy St. Patrick's day to everyone. In true "mom" fashion I was heavy handed in my use of green food coloring yesterday. Alex LOVED his green milk. He drinks plenty of milk as is, but it was just super special yesterday, so he had it every chance he got. Also in the spirit of St. Patrick's day Alex helped me make some Irish Soda Bread. He calls it special St. Patrick's Day bread. Sadly though, that is about the extent of our celebration. We did make it to the park to play for awhile and visited the goats up the street.

Ben is officially 15 months now too. He threw a major fit at his checkup today, the likes of which I have not seen since his colicky days. That boy did NOT want to be touched by Dr. Mary. The good news is that he is perfectly healthy and growing like crazy. His vocabulary and understanding continue to grow by leaps and bounds every day. He saw a picture of a train today and proudly said "choo choo".

Tomorrow I have the daunting task of teaching a group of roughly 20 toddlers how to make pinch pots with real clay. No play-doh for this group. Not really sure what I was thinking when I opted to do this, oh well.

Curling is almost done for the season. We have one final real game and then a funspiel. And yes, my team is playing for the league championship this weekend!!! Honestly, I don't think we have a chance at winning (the skip of the opposing team played for team USA in the deaf olympics a couple of years ago) but it will be fun and the worst we can do is come in 2nd, so not bad for the season. Oh, and one more fun little curling thing, I get to play in the Texas Open Bonspiel in Houston in April. Yay, I can't wait for that!!! Mike and the boys will be flying solo that weekend so Aunt Stephanie & Uncle Michael, if you're reading this and you want to help...

So that's that. Dinner that I had planned to have ready for everyone to eat at a reasonable hour of course got derailed slightly. It's in the oven, but the boys will undoubtedly get hungry before it's done, so I think we're in for another round of veggie quesadillas.

This & That

I always seem to think of many amusing tidbits to share but when the time comes to actually retell those tales I usually can't remember what I wanted to write.

So, the latest happenings here:

The beautiful big new garden is planted, complete with a very cool little ant sculpture. In time hopefully my plants will grow big and fill out some of the holes. Anyway, it makes me happy everytime I look at it and it's a great feeling to know that something will live through the summer Texas heat down in that little corner of the yard. So long grass, I don't miss ya!

On sunflowers, best to plant the seeds directly in the ground because those tender little sprouts are a big pain in the you know what to transplant.

Alex and Ben seem to be afflicted with some sort of silly juice tonight, wow are they wound up! They are splashing up a storm in the bathtub. Hopefully they will sleep well tonight.

It has now ben several hours since I started this, and I have no clue whatelse was on my mind. It's late and I'm tired so time to say night-night :-)

Another Reason to Love Austin

Yesterday was the 81st annual Austin Kite Festival. It's exactly what you would think, everyone gathered together in a big park flying kites. This is the 3rd or 4th time we have gone to the festival, and it is always a blast. So, while all you east coasters were getting pummeled with snow yesterday, we were enjoying temps in the low 60s, having a glorious picnic lunch lunch with family and friends and flying kites. We got the cow kite up easily, had a little more trouble with the fish kite (needed more room and a bit more wind). In addition to everyone being able to fly their own kites, there are demo areas with kites bigger than you can imagine, stunt kites, homemade kites, everything. There is also the requisite amount of food, music, and alcohol. Really there was no down side to the festival, it's just a blast and everyone has fun!

In other news, Ben's vocabulary is ever increasing. One of the first things we taught Alex to say was "Up, please" when he wanted to picked up for any reason. It always came out sounding like "uppies". We were trying to get Ben to say Up Please or Uppies or something, what we got was "Up go". He also says "here ya go" if he's handing us something and "wanna go" if he wants to go somewhere. They all come out sounding as if it is one word instead of multiples, but it is just so cute!

Our massive garden project is off to a splendid start. We spent some time at the coolest garden center in Austin this weekend, got some plants and finally got them in the ground tonight. We actually couldn't plant them this weekend because it got too cold in the evenings. We need a few more things, but hopefully we have chosen well and the plants will thrive and fill in our huge new garden. We even found a couple of nice big rocks to fill it out.

Ben got his first haircut tonight! Alex is so good for me when I cut his hair that I didn't remember how wiggly Ben would be. Of course he is a good bit younger than Alex was at the time of his first haircut. Anyway, it's not a dramatic change, just enough to keep it under control a little bit. Yes, I got pictures, yes I need to post them, no I don't know when I'll get to it!

Ben is sprouting bunches of teeth too! For all of you that have to deal with cranky teethers I truly am sorry. It's no big deal for my guys. If I didn't periodically do a tooth check, I'd never even know a new one was coming. So, he has 3 on the bottom, one front one and one molar on top. Yep, it's kind of a weird order in which they are coming in but as long as they all cut through eventually I guess it doesn't really matter.

Surely I had many other things to mention, but I can't think of them at the moment. So all you folks back east enjoy that snow. I'll be enjoying temps in the 70s and 80s for the rest of the week!