Crawfishin'

The other night, while at one of our favorite parks, Shawn noticed a few crawfish as we were walking over a bridge.  He decided that we all needed to go back the next evening and learn how to catch crawfish!  So Tuesday evening we packed up some bacon, string, a bucket and a net and met our friends, the Cliffords at the park.  We had no real expectations other than just a lovely evening with great weather. 

 

We has SO much fun!!!  The kids all had success catching them!

We were excited to have the first one caught.

Ava is like me....she must try to catch every.single.crawfish in the water.

Both boys were interested but a little wary.

It was way easier than fishing, but needs a slow and steady hand.

Levi sort of wanted to catch them, but mostly was happy to run around.  He was fine with me doing the work and at one point, as he was playing behind me, he came up and asked "Did I catch one?" while I was crawfishing on his behalf.

And here we are back at the Cliffords with our haul.....THIRTY-NINE CRAWFISH!!  We had really debated while at the park whether to take these home or release them.  None of us had ever done this before so we were a little nervous that we would get sick from eating them.  But we threw caution to the wind and Jeff and Kim boiled them up with some spices!

 

Ready to be eaten!

Obviously they were not bad at all!  I think because these crawfish were living in a fresh spring environment, they didn't taste "dirty."  They actually were really good and tasted a lot like shrimp!  We were all so proud of our little impromptu crawfish boil!  I think we might be hooked on this!

Zilker Botanical Gardens

We had quite a few friends in the area stop by and visit us during our open house.  We were honored to see them taking the time to come be a part of this with us.  One very special guest was Gramme!  She drove from Tyler just to be at our open house!  We didn't tell the kids she was coming so they were very surprised and excited to see her!  After the open house, we headed home to regroup and relax for a bit.  Then we took Gramme to Austin for a touristy afternoon.

We started at the Zilker Botanical Gardens.  They were having a Fairy Garden exhibit which I thought might help spur the girls' imaginations on as they start to make their own fairy gardens in the backyard.  We were in for a real treat.  We'd never been before and it was wonderful.  The weather was perfect and there was SO much to see.  I'd love to go back again and just walk the trails slowly.  Here's a few pictures from our afternoon.

I just can't get enough of this color, especially in flower form.

After the fairy garden area, we headed into the dinosaur area.  Loved the landscaping in here.  Lots of water, palm trees, waterfall, and dino fossils and tracks.

Why yes, that is a dinosaur in the background behind me.

Then we headed into the Japanese garden section.  It was so beautiful.  As we came upon this area, we noticed that they had stepping stones in the pond that you could walk across.  We probably would have let our children do it, except that as we were approaching it, a little boy lost his footing and went straight in.  The only thing on him not soaked was the very top of his head.  That sealed the deal...none of my kids were going....and after watching him, none of them asked! ha!

Might have to get this picture printed out....love the colors!

One last fairy garden to see as we left. 

 

After the gardens, we headed to an iconic place to eat called Sandy's.  It's a walk-up burger place that also sells frozen custard.  I'm pretty sure it's been around since at least the 1950's and not much has changed.  It was good ol' burger, fries and custard....still can't beat a Mighty Fine though....:)  After Sandy's we decided to do a little hunting around for a few not-so-well known places in Austin.  The girls were working on a Girl Scout badge that they could get for visiting some different places in Austin and since we were close to downtown, we went ahead and did a little extra looking.  We found the moonlight tower(s) in downtown Austin that were used as street lights before there were street lights, if that makes sense.  Then we visited the Treaty Oak, a tree in downtown Austin, standing for about 500 years and used by Indians and Anglos to work out treaties as well as wars.   After this, it was about 8 o'clock and we were beyond exhausted.  We headed home and all collapsed pretty quickly.   There's nothing we love more, than finding new places to explore.  Even though we've been here almost seven years, we seem to never really run out of new things to check out. And the cherry on top was getting to have Gramme go with us! 

Official Open House

As we were digging through the storage building behind the church building, we came across Duke's old chalkboard sign.  I took it home, cleaned it up, and came up with this little slogan....I thought it was pretty a pretty good play on the whole "meat" thing. (Hebrews 5:14 talks about "solid food" a.k.a meat,  meaning the deeper things of the Bible)  This was at the main entrance visitors walked through.

 

Here's the cradle roll room.  From mental picture to finished product, I was very excited and happy with how my fabric kites turned out.  Love it!

Then it was time for the official ribbon cutting.  Hopefully this picture makes it into the local paper.

Everyone from the congregation that came out to help and support our open house!

We served a free BBQ lunch (again a nod to what our building used to be) and gave tours of the building and educated anyone who wanted to know about the church of Christ.

It was months in the making and everyone had a lot of nervous excitement for the day and it was a great success!  We had around 200 people from the community come and tour the building and eat some BBQ!

E.B. makes a visit

Ready to go (I LOVED Elle's dress so much.  I was so sad that they didn't carry it in my size!!)

After church we came home to see if the EB had left anything on the table for us.

 

Why, yes he did!

After lunch, Shawn and I hid about 100 eggs in the backyard!

This is one of my favorite eggs.  It has a suction cup on it and will stick to any shiny-type surface :)

The kids love the hunt and Shawn and I love trying to hide them so good that they can't be found!

Time to lay it all out and check out the loot.

L2L

This past Easter weekend, we headed to Dallas for a convention called Lads to Leaders/Leaderettes.  It is very much like the convention we participated in last year called Leadership Training for Christ(LTC).  We wanted to check it out since none of us have ever done it before.  We went with four other families from church for a total of 10 adults and 12 kids. 

We started by staying at Valerie's parents house in the Dallas area, on Thursday night.

 

Friday morning we got up bright and early, with lots of eagerness and anticipation.

I was the scrapbooking "coach" (surprise, surprise) and I had three girls that compiled a 22 page scrapbook covering this last year at Gabriel Oaks.  What a year it was....a great time to scrapbook if ever there was!

Each of my girls also entered a piece of artwork into the event.  The theme was "Here Am I, Send Me" and this was Ava's interpretation (with a little help, though the artwork is fully hers.)

Here was Elle's artwork, completely her own idea and art.

Joel and Ava also created a banner for one of the categories.  This was a major feat to get them to concentrate long enough to get this done.  Valerie was their "coach" for that.

Here we are getting checked in at the Gaylord Texan Hotel.  What a wonderful hotel it was!!!

Upon entering our room, I immediately made all the kids get on the bed and jump.  For once they didn't argue with me.

Something that kept us busy in our down time was a huge train track with an entire town.  The kids loved watching the train go around and around.

Speaking of down time, we had a lot of it.  Our kids didn't compete in a huge amount of things this year so we had lots of chill time.  Thank goodness I brought small travel games to play!

Every once in a while the Valdez's tablet came out and things got very calm and quite for a few minutes.

Buds

We had to have a quiet time in the room Friday and I just needed to get a picture of my children being calm....it isn't seen very often.

Here's a few of our girls.

Here we are ready for Friday night's award ceremony (longest, worst experience of my life) We left at the 3 hour mark of sitting in these tiny seat with kids in our laps at 10 pm.

Everyone that was a first timer got to come up on stage and walk across.

Saturday morning we all met by the pool and had breakfast together. (none of the women were very happy that I took this picture at 8:30 in the morning)

 

Our family

Saturday afternoon, it was time for Bible Bowl.  Our team of four competed in the 7-8th grade division since we had two that were in that range.  Shawn was the "coach" for this and they studied many Sunday afternoons, going over and over the book of Acts.

More downtime for the other two while the Bible Bowl was going on...they did so good!

Our family playing in the revolving door....endless entertainment.

At the awards ceremony for Saturday night, we found out that we had placed 4th in our age division in Bible Bowl!  I think there were a lot of teams so that was really awesome!

 

As soon as we left the stage, we headed straight for the car for the three hour ride home.  Our kids slept THE ENTIRE WAY home...all three hours...that has never happened before.  We pulled into the driveway at midnight, got them in bed, and started prep work for Sunday....Easter.