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!