Sick and Tired

Poor Ian is a little bit sick. He threw up at the grocery store this morning so we are home taking it easy instead of out running errands. He jumped out of bed this morning declaring, "I had a good sleep!" but unfortunately between then and now he came down with a fever and an upset stomach. Unlike his sister, he has not thrown up very much in his life, so when I give him a bucket to puke in, he lays down with it over his face like this instead of stowing it safely by him so it's there when he needs it. Such a cute, sweet boy. Hopefully he feels much better soon!

Best. Show. Ever.

Where to begin? Where to begin? Let it be known, to anyone who doesn't already know this about me, that I am a HUGE Coldplay fan. HUGE! I think when you go see a band you truly love, you are in for a great night, but I have not been to such an amazing concert in all my concert-going years! In the picture above, you can see the stage behind me. Our seats were not bad at all. We bought them on stubhub.com and we were pretty confident that they wouldn't be awful, but they ended up better than I imagined they would be. Scratch that. They turned out to be SPECTACULAR seats when the band came up and played on a small stage about 10 feet away from us.
See them in the background of this shot? SO close!!!
Here's Chris Martin getting ready to play a couple songs while the rest of the band took a quick breather. Just so you know how close he was to us, I got this picture on our crappy, point and shoot camera. The thing does not get good pictures, especially not at a distance. If only they had set the piano up facing us! Oh, and they had another small stage set up back on the lawn. They played a couple songs out there later in the show. That's real love for your fans when you get out there with them like that.

I'm going to take a moment to say how much I just LOVE British people. I love their accents and the way they speak. The phrasing they use just sounds so much smarter than the way we Americans speak. That's probably another reason why I love Coldplay like I do. Chris Martin had incredible stage presence. He's seemed so smart and funny and really engaged the crowd. When he came out for the encore, he was telling us that they had a CD available for everyone, "for the ludicrous price of zero dollars and zero cents." Funny and AMAZING! How cool is that to give everyone a free CD?!?! So cool.
It was such a great night! Big thanks to our friends in the ward who were willing to watch our kids till midnight. Thank you, thank you, thank you! And thanks to Spencer for deciding that this would be a good way to celebrate my birthday a little early. Love you!

When Dad's in charge....

...things like this might happen. I went to the temple tonight, so Spencer stayed home with the kids. He took them to the pool for a bit and Ian took a nasty spill on their way back. Poor little guy. Other than Ian's fall, Spencer's night with the kids was pretty good. He fed them the "healthy dinner" they requested--corn, broccoli and bread and they ate all of it! And they were in bed by 8:15. All in all, not too bad. Could have been a little better (no-fat-lips better), could have been a LOT worse.

Roller Skating Adventure

And what an adventure it was! If you are like us, you would think it would be a really fun little outing to go to the skating rink next door and have a great time skating as a family. You would know that it would be a little tough and the kids would need help, but it would still be fun. Well, if that's what you thought, you would be mistaken, as we were.
Both Madeleine and Ian were really looking forward to going skating. We had peeked into the place last Saturday but didn't go until two-for-one night on Tuesday, so we had time to anticipate the excitement. Spencer showed them the skating babies video so they could see some skating in action. I think it made them think they would be professionals right off the bat.Anyway, skating is much harder than it looks, especially to Madeleine and Ian. Before we went, Madeleine was telling me about all the tricks she was planning to do on her skates. By the time we were ready to go home, she was yelling, "Skating IS NOT fun!!!" Ian hated it just as much but he was not as vocal as his sister.

We are still glad we tried it and we now know that these kids need a lot more practice on skates to get comfortable enough to think it's fun. Better luck next time!

Where have we been?

Honestly, there is not an exciting answer to that. I have just been doing other stuff besides blogging about life these days. But also, we haven't been having a ton of excitement. That, and I always seem to forget the camera or just not take any pictures when we do actually do something. Who wants to read a blog post without pictures??

For the 4th of July we went to Austin to check out that happenin' town. I guess that's fairly blog-worthy. Turns out that much of the cool stuff about Austin is live music and such, aimed at adults, but we managed to find some family fun too.

First of all, on our way there we stopped by the Blue Bell Creamery in Brenham to take a tour and see how they make ice cream. That stop didn't go as planned. Maybe we are just really impatient, but there was a really long line that we would have had to wait in for about an hour (outside in the heat!) before getting to the tour, so we decided to swing into the Country Store they have there, buy our ice cream, and skip the tour. We told ourselves that our kids wouldn't have appreciated the tour anyway, but we all appreciated the ice cream. We tried four kinds and our (Spencer's and mine) favorites were the butter pecan and the cherry cobbler. Mmmmm! Madeleine liked mint chocolate chip. Ian seemed to love them all equally.

We got to our hotel in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day swimming before heading out for some BBQ for dinner. That was kind of a fiasco. Ian ended up throwing up right after they brought our food, so we hurried and left and took our food back to the hotel with us. Whatever Ian had didn't stick with him. He seemed to be fine just a little while later. Thank goodness. Since he was feeling better we took a little drive around Austin so we would know where were going the next day.

Saturday morning, we went out to breakfast and then found a parade. That was really fun! It was very small and I think we only caught the end of it, but they set up a bunch of activities in the school parking lot where the parade ended. The kids got to play games, get their faces painted and climb into a fire truck.

Later that day, we too a dip at the Barton Springs Pool which is fed by a natural spring. It was interesting. First off, it was really cold water compared to the 90 degree pool at the hotel. And there was a bunch of algae floating in the water and growing on the bottom and sides. Madeleine was very turned off by the slippery floor of the pool. I can't lie, I didn't love that part either. But she did love the diving board. I REALLY wish I had had my camera!! She was one of the smallest/youngest in line to go off the diving board and she did great. It was so cute! Spencer went first so he could be in the water to give her moral support (and help swimming, if she needed it, which she didn't). After his impressive dive, Madeleine took her turn and did a nice, graceful jump into the water. Up to this point she was complaining a lot about the cool water, but said she liked the pool much better when her feet didn't have to touch the bottom. Ian was really disappointed that he couldn't jump off the diving board too. He would have done it in a second if they allowed him to wear his floatie vest, but alas they did not, so I promised him he could jump off his aunt and uncle's diving board as much as he wants once we are back in AZ. Erika, I hope you and Ken don't mind.

For dinner, we found a new favorite restaurant for Madeleine. It's called La Madeleine. How could it not be her favorite? We had seen one near us in The Woodlands and they even sell some of their soups in the grocery stores, but we hadn't tried it yet so it was very exciting. It's a little French cafe, with soups, salads and lots of baked goods. Very good. Definitely recommend it.

For fireworks that night we pretty much followed the crowd to where we could see the show without going into whatever the venue was that put on the display. We ended up on the deck at a car wash and our view wasn't too bad at all. We love watching the fireworks and picking out our favorites, which are basically all of them.

Sunday we got up and headed home so we could make it back in time to get ready for 2pm church. It was a really great weekend. I hope you can imagine it since I have no pictures to prove it. I'm going to try to do better about that. More pictures is my goal!