Flashback: April Showers, May flowers and Other Assorted Nonsense

 When I was thinking back on the year to pick out a few highlights to add to the blog, for some reason I couldn’t come up with anything for spring.  I had to go back through some of our pictures to see what we were doing with ourselves during that brief Austin window between cold-ish winter and oh so hot summer.  I found some very lovely pictures of the boys playing in the bluebonnets and a lovely shot of the family at Easter…

I also found some fun shots of us all keeping it weird at Eeyore’s Birthday Party (a bizarre Austin festival that we attend when we are able), including a shot of Lincoln dancing with a woman dressed as a cat.  Did I mention we were keeping it weird?

Let’s see, what else?  We squeezed in another bout of strep throat, but managed to avoid a hospital stay.  Sorry, no pictures of that one.  Luckily, we caught it early and were all better in just a few days.  Our big spring adventure was our first family camping trip.  We loaded up the whole famdamily and headed to Pace Bend Park, not too far outside Austin.  Although it was only a couple of days (because we weren’t sure if the boys or their mother would survive a week in the wilderness), we had an incredible time being together in a beautiful place without a t.v. or computer to distract us.  We even pretended the iPhone didn’t get service.

The weather was perfect, every campsite had a view of the water, the wildflowers were blooming everywhere, and the park was full of these gorgeous, lumbering butterflies that made the whole scene worthy of a musical number in a Disney movie.  In truth, we decided on camping because we couldn’t afford a real vacation and still wanted to get away for a few days, but it was such a peaceful, idyllic time that we came back far more rejuvenated than if we had schlepped off to some amusement park or kiddie friendly vacation spot.

We pulled out a hammock I bought a few years ago that we had never managed to put up at the house and the tent we had only used once, though we must have lent it to half a dozen people in the years since we bought it.  Anyway, we strung the hammock between two very shady trees and spent the days hiking, swimming, and lounging in the hammock.  At night, we roasted marshmallows on the fire (a fire, by the way, that was ridiculously hard to get going.  I mean, it’s not like we were rubbing sticks together; we had lighters and matches and dry wood.  Next time, we are totally bringing some not-very-authentic-but-much-less-annoying propellant.) and then curled up together in our sleeping bags, migrating together into one big pile in the middle of the night as the temperature dropped.

Nico loved sitting by the fire and even cooked us all hotdogs one night.  No joke, he sat there and cooked them one by one. We even read scary stories one night.  Linc loved playing in the dirt, which admittedly we thought was weird, though we decided not to make an issue of it.  It did make us question the necessity of spending money on toys, when we was perfectly happy to draw shapes in the dirt and throw rocks into a field with his brother.  On the last morning there, as the boys wandered around together in the wildflowers, Sam and I pronounced it the first annual camping trip because it was too great not to make a family tradition.  We even found a spot to hang the hammock at home, and every time I lie in it, I think of napping in it on our trip with Linc asleep in my arms.  Couldn’t ask for a better souvenir.