Taking Back the Playground

Since it was so nice out side (take that groundhog) Emmy and I trekked down the street to the rather lame "park" in our neighboorhood. I had another one of those " oh god, I'm turning into a mom (and not in a positive way)" moment.

I naively thought that playgrounds were for kids... turns out they're for high school (or junior high kids) to have really public really loud fights with their boyfriends on the cell phone and make out (I'm just going to call it making out because I don't want to think about what else they were doing.) This was at 4 o'clock in the afternoon!!! For God's sake, can't you wait until it's dark!!! (See, I told you... I'm getting old)

Well I decided that this was MY park and being that I'm old I can tell these kids what to do... yeah right! I didn't tell them to leave, but I did sic my baby on them. The lovebirds were nuzzled up in front of Emmy's favorite slide and she didn't take too kindly to that. She would climb up the stairs and stare at them. And I just let her =) After about ten to fifteen minutes of me and Emmy climbing up and down the stairs and singing if you're happy and you know it....the lovebirds gave up. Not exacltly conducive to " the mood"....

Yes, i DID snap a picture of them as they were leaving... VICTORY!!!!!!! and somewhere right now this girl is telling on of her friends how this old lady and her dumb baby ruined her romantic afternoon with her boyfriend... sigh.. At least they didn't tell me Sorry Ma'am as they were leaving. I probably would've just cried and gone home.

After Emmy and I high-fived our passive agressive victory over teenagers we took our sweet time climbing all over OUR park.. That and Emmy ate an awful lot of mulch....We may be de-worming soon...


She can pretty much do the entire "park" by herself now! (this is another tilt your head to the left video..yes I have a problem)


She's also been working on lots of animal noises and signs... She was doing the sign for Bird like crazy but I couldn't get it on tape. Enjoy the horse, cat, cow, and sheep!

Girl Time!

It's been almost three years since these girls and I headed off to Mexico. That was four baby girls and what feels like a lifetime ago. We decided that it had been WAY too long since we got away and headed for a quick trip.

We went all out on our hotel and stayed at The Driskill on 6th Street. I am getting WAY too used to living the high life on vacation. We had out own personal valet and stayed in one of the nicest rooms at the hotel on the "penthouse" floor. We dropped our bags with the valet and headed out for lunch before we picked up Lauren at her conference. It was feeling pretty nice outside so we headed to Shady Grove for a bite outside. In about ten minutes we realized it was WAAAAY colder than we thought, unfortunately we had already ordered our margaritas.... so we sat and shivered and drank frozen drinks. You should always drink a margarita with mittens on =)

We then picked up Lauren and headed to the nearest nail shop to officially kick off the weekend. It doesn't really start until the pedicures happen =)

We did some light shopping but quickly realized we were all WAY to tired to do much of anything. We had dinner at Hula Hut and were in bed by 10:30.... and were all insanely excited about it.... times have CHANGED.

We slept late (well all of us except Betsy who couldn't turn off the 7:30 alarm in her head)which was pretty much just as awesome as going to bed at 10:30. Then we had breakfast at the Bakery at the Driskill. Can you say yum! Michelle's pancakes were so good that Betsy and I had them again the next morning. The sad thing is that this wasn't even all of our food!

After gorging ourselves we headed over to The Domain, which was this really cool outdoor shopping center in Austin. We asked a lady to take a picture in front of the cute landscaping and she decided that the front door of Borders was better. Whatever, I guess.

Ok, so this is a whooping crane, but we pretended it was a stork. I mean, it was a gigantic white bird so it works. There is a place at The Domain called the Steeping Room, which is basically like Starbucks for tea. I had something called a Moteato and it was AWESOME! It tasted exactly like a mojito. It was ALMOST as expensive as one with alchohol, but oh well. Where else could I get a Moteato. I had to.

After all that shopping we were starving and in need of refreshments. We managed to find a Happy Hour at Kona Grill and proceeded to eat two orders of avocado eggrolls, potstickers, and THREE orders of edamame in about an hour. We had a major craving for beans. And we ate them, and ate them, and ate them... until we didn't want to see any more beans, or anything green or shaped like a bean.

I'm so lucky that after twenty, yes twenty years, I can still call these girlies my best friends. It's amazing that through different colleges, different towns, and different lives we've managed to keep up. We are so blessed to have each other, and I hope that Emmy, Caroline, Kate, and little Richard can keep it up for us! They really don't have a choice =)

Happy Birthday Pops!

I can't believe that it's already that time of year again.. the birthday month of March! We kicked off today by celebrating Pops! We started off with an Italian feast at a little local place called Christopher's. Mom had just talked and talked about the bread and well, it was REALLY good, but I just had to take a picture of what was left in the bread basket after we finished eating. Can we say LOW CAL!

We chowed down and Emmy roamed around the party room snagging bread from anyone who would give it to her.

We headed back to the house for gifts and desert (as if anyone needed it after the 8 baskets of bread we ate!) Here's Emmy with the Birthday Pops!

Laura brought Emmy a Macedonian Barbie! She's a little hippier and she has much larger lips and different eyes. It's so funny. I never thought that they would look different, but of course they do! (We're glad Loo is back!)

Mom has tried over and over again to buy bubbles for Emmy and they're all been duds. They wouldn't make a bubble for anything. So she went crazy and bought the Bubblemaker2000 (or something like that) that basically takes any work out of making bubbles. You just shoot the gun and it does it all for you. Emmy loved it! So did the rest of us =) We all took turns shooting each other and running around. I'm going to get mine tomorrow =) We kept trying to take "bubble" family pictures, but the wind kept changing and we all ended up with a face full of bubble soap and sticky hair. Happy Birthday Pops!