"Is this Park City? No, Mommy, we're going back to Park City actually to stay with Uncle Eric"

Our friend Eric is in town for a few days and Amara was thrilled! We enjoyed seeing him too :-)

Getting ready for Sundance

Hey, who was that handsome man?

Holidays!

Happy Hanukkah!

Amara made this great menorah at school - out of marshmallows and frosting and birthday candles :-)

At the Children's Museum in Austin

This one's for you, Grandpa Joe!

And then my dinosaur ATE your dinosaur for breakfast!

This is the coolest instrument ever, although I think I liked it more than Amara. I call it a bop-organ, where you bop the different colored tubes with a padded paddle and it makes music!

Some of Austin's famous BBQ

One of the legendary BBQ joints - you place your order in a smokehouse room and it is handed to you on red butcher paper, that you plop down on a table to eat straight off the paper...no forks allowed

And my favorite part was the stack(s) of wood out back to feed the BBQ...wow.

Hook 'em Horns

Amara with her Longhorn gamehat(s) on...

Bedtime with my cousins: I'm the one WITHOUT the truck pajamas

A Tootie Ta, A Tootie Ta, A Tootie Taa Taa

Jackie and Amara perform The Tootie Ta...Oliver could hardly wait to join in. 

Thanksgiving

We had a lovely Thanksgiving with Yvette, her whole family, and Beth. Thank you! Below you see Nana entertaining the kids with crafts before dessert (and yes, that's Eliot in a dress), then Beth, Becky, Justin and Yvette. 

Feeding the spaghetti monster

We met up with Amara's new friend Jackie at Discovery on Friday AM. Here you see Amara feeding balls into the spaghetti tubes, Jackie and Eliot lifting the balls into a big tube maze, Amara and Jackie in their make-a-pinwheel class, Amara negotiating with another little girl on planting flowers in the windowboxes of the 'house', Oliver and Amara unpacking groceries in the 'house', Amara ringing up my groceries (I had to pay $26 for a jar of peanut butter!) and flying the helicopter. Good stuff. 

Feast with the Beasts

 Amara and I went to the zoo, where they fed all the animals special treats - oftentimes hidden inside pumpkins. The elephants stomped on all the pumpkins in their habitat, and even ate a couple whole! Our favorite was the cougars although for some reason I didn't take any pictures. They received paper mache turkey pinatas hidden in the trees. They lept into the trees, batted them out of the trees and then ripped them apart to get the raw meat inside. Yum.

The picture below is the lynx, the elephants, and then our own little beast on the slides.