Halloween Costume Craziness
Oct 24 2008

We’re just a week away from Halloween and last weekend we got around to thinking about costumes.  Our son has been telling us for months he wants to be Luke Skywalker but when he walked into a Party City store last Saturday, he decided he wanted to be a Stormtrooper.  I think he might have mentioned it once before and I think I said ‘aren’t those the bad buys?‘ and he said ‘Mom, there are good stormtroopers and bad ones and the one I want to be is a good one.‘  I said ‘Really? Well I guess that’s OK then.’ 

So it was chaos at Party City and they were out of his costume.  Our daughter decided she wants to be a princess.  Where she gets that I don’t know because I’m pretty far from the princess type (or shall I say dress-up-like-a-princess type 🙂 ).  I was a tomboy.  I never had any interest in Barbie Dolls growing up so I’m guessing she’s probably going to go all sugar and spice and everything nice on me!  They had a costume she liked, but the bag was broken and I asked the gal who worked there if it had everything and she said it did…well of course it didn’t.  It was missing the tiara.  She gave me another one which had a tiara but it was taped (yes scotch taped!) together because it was broken.  I was annoyed they would actually try to sell that to some unsuspecting soul, and we left. 

We came home and did a search on Amazon but couldn’t find what we liked at the price we thought reasonable.  So much to the dismay of our kids, we had to put off the costume finding one more day.  They did have some cute stuff on Amazon and if you are still looking, you can shop for costumes (linked to Amazon) or Halloween music (linked to Amazon).  If you use those links to buy something, a few cents (literally) will go into my Amazon account and some time in the next decade there will be enough in there for them to actually pay me for promoting their Halloween stuff for them! 

So my husband took our son to another Party City while I stayed home with our daughter who decided to throw up a few times after going to Maker Faire last Sunday, and they found a Star Wars Clone Trooper costume he liked and a different princess costume for our daughter.  She liked the costume.  So all was well in the household for at least a few hours and she didn’t throw up again. 

The End!

We Survived A Montezuma Mexican Adventure
Aug 10 2008

We arrived back in the United States yesterday and boy what a trip!  The first part was great fun spending time with my sister-in-law and family and a couple of days in San Miguel de Allende but the day night before we flew to Mexico City, Montezuma exacted his revenge (the link takes you to a British phrase finder site that give you other funny names for this condition around the world that I’d never heard before like Tokyo Trots and Delhi Belly).  

It seems that invariably when we travel someone gets sick and this time it was me and to a lesser extent the kids.  The only plus from getting sick is that I think I lost the 3 lbs I gained during the first part of the trip.  🙂

Some details are just too crazy to get into but all I can say is that it is good to be back in the good ‘ole US of A where: 

• The streets are clean!  When we arrived in Mexico City one of the first things our son asked us was why the streets were so dirty?!
• You can drink water straight from the tap if you want to.
• Customer service really means that the customer comes first.  Renting a car in Mexico can be time consuming/draining when compared to renting in the US.
• Breakfast is in the morning, lunch is around noon, and dinner is around 6 or 7 pm.  In Mexico they usually eat their lunch around 2 or 3pm and then a light dinner around 9 pm.
• They take credit cards pretty much everywhere you go.  Many places we went in Mexico did not take credit cards so if you were out of cash, you had to the nearby ATM which happened to us several times.

 The few things we do miss are: 

• Our family in Leon, Mexico
• The cooler temperatures (60 to 80 degrees versus today’s high in Austin of 105!!)
• The beautiful flowers
• The kid-friendly restaurants.  In Mexico many restaurants had easily accessible, closed-in play scapes where the kids could run around and you can watch them calmly from your table.  It made eating with kids much more enjoyable!

I’ll be playing catch up for a few days.  Since I was able to check email periodically while I was out, I only have hundreds of emails to go through instead of thousands!

Here’s a picture my husband took of a section of a mural done on a wall by Eleanor Coen in 1942 inside a museum of art in San Miguel de Allende:

A Mexican Vacation
Aug 4 2008

We are visiting family in Mexico which means posting has been and will be light for the next week or so. I’ve seen some interesting things during our visit to do posts about later ranging from tamale stands to gorgeous flowers to street peddlers to laughing kids.  Our flight was thankfully uneventful and so far our trip has been really nice.

We took our first overnight trip away from the kids since they were born!  My wonderful sister-in-law and brother-in-law were kind enough to watch them while we took a two day escape to San Miguel de Allende for the weekend!  It’s so great to have family with older kids who like to play and watch our kids. 🙂

So in the meantime, here’s a picture from San Miguel for your viewing pleasure:

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
Dec 25 2007

Happy Holidays & Happy New Year to all of my friends and readers.  May 2008 bring smiles, successful projects, fun stuff, and much laughter to your life.  May we all become a little less afraid of following our dreams each and every day!

This year was our very first year to get a Christmas tree.  We’ve always been traveling or the kids have been too young to really notice or we have been too lazy to set one up.  Our son helped me pick this perfect sized, pre-lit one from Target (note to self: buy Target stock), and it looks so cool when it’s plugged in.  Erin is grooming our son to be an avid UT Austin Longhorn sports fan (in case you didn’t notice).

Happy Halloween
Oct 31 2007

Here’s wishing a Happy Halloween to everyone!  Here are some pictures of the kids dressed up for a neighborhood party this past weekend.  Personally, I’m surprised our son did not want to be a Transformer and instead opted to be the muscle bound Red Power Ranger!  They are excited to go trick or treating.

Rain, Rain Go Away – Happy 4th of July
Jul 3 2007

It seems like it’s been raining here in Texas pretty much non-stop for the last several weeks.  I’ve never seen so much rain the entire time I’ve lived in Austin, which has been 14 years on and off.  I just got back home (now I’m in the home office) after a lunch meeting.  It was drizzling with the sun breaking through the clouds for the last couple of hours and now it’s pouring!  We have had record levels of rain, the lakes are high, AND they have canceled 4th of July Fireworks shows around town due to excessive rain.  People can’t even go boating on the lakes.  If this keeps up they could have filmed Evan Almighty here and saved a bunch of money! 🙂

We will be heading to a friend’s house who lives on the lake for their annual 4th of July party (despite there being no fireworks tonight) this evening so hopefully the rain will let up a bit for the kids to run around outside and play.

Here are some pictures of the rain that was just coming down outside of our house….

View from the front door:

 View of the patio floor:

View from the playroom window: