Today I learned that chickadees use their beaks and their feet to crack a tasty nut shell open!

I think chickadees are daydreamers too—what a beautiful view!

Since when does 6 look so grown up? (did anyone notice the t-shirt? :)

Look at all those freckles that appeared after our trip to Texas!

I don’t care what anyone else says—up here 75 and sunny means it’s hot enough for smoothies!

Yum—EGG SALAD SANDWICHES!!!

So, exactly how many can I eat? And can I have these in my lunch for school and can you make these every weekend and…

I think this makes number 3 and the egg euphoria was definitely penetrating Nolan’s brain!

This year we decided to do tye-die Easter eggs—they turned out awesome and somewhat brought back Airbender memories!

Not an ugly egg in the batch!

These 2 are pictures of a hail storm we were subjected to back in April. It caused a lot of roof and siding damage in our neighborhood and up and down Airport Road, plus the west side of Madison. It started out dime sized and coated everything like snow, then paused and all I can say for sure is that the hail became big enough that I could no longer be outside takign photos and inside it sounded like the war of 1812 on our walls and ceiling! The second photo is a chunk of ice I grabbed after the storm to preserve in the freezer. What? Don’t you do that too? :)

Then…a week or so later (just before May) we received a really bizarre collection of weather—the meteorologists didn’t even know what to call it. It was snow mixed with sleet and sometimes rain and then more snow and somewhere int here tiny bouncy ice balls too. I was only able to collect the tiny ice balls.

The early May weather was great though. Kelly even decided to give the famous dragon kite a try…

with some pretty good success…

well, at least until the dragon kite decided it was too tired to go again.

Despite the rather wacky weather for both April and May…it was still fun watching all of the foliage come awake for Spring.

My Murano needed some fine tuning a few weeks ago (it is already 8 years old!!) so the car place lent me a 2010 Murano for the day. Of course this didn’t occur to me until after I was seating comfortably in the driver seat—what a sneaky ploy on their part. They were clearly marketing the car too! I mean seriously—check out the backseat. Where are the cracker crumbs, books and toys??? I had totally forgotten what a car could look like sans kids!

Check this out—Nolan thought this was the coolest new feature—a moon roof for the front seat and the back seat!

OMG!! I had to share this too—they added a button to open/close the back hatch (my Murano’s hatch only opens from the outside). In fact, it was so exciting—-do you know how much easier that would have been when my hands were full of child, grocers, stroller, book, hats/mittens, etc????—that I had to play the beeping sound (of door opening and closing) for anyone and everyone I saw or spoke to that day! I guess you could say they had me at the hatch button!

Yes, that is Mr. Nolan Senecal under all of that gear and yes, we’ve (at least for now) opened the door to hockey. If anything doesn’t look quite right—that would be because I have no idea what hockey players wear, where the pads go, etc. I sort of just googled it and made it up the rest of the way. It ended up being okay—just a few minor tweaks here and there. I at least knew nothing was supposed to cover his eyes.

Nolan’s been taking skating lessons for almost 3 years…he decided he was ready for the next challenge—and I have to say it looked really cool/amazing seeing him in the full gear and out on the ice.

You’d think he wasn’t even wearing the 10lbs of gear that I know I put on him!

We are lucky for now…for his age group it’s mostly cross-ice. If there are games they are small—like 3 on 3 without the pushing and shoving. We won’t have to be super worried until he’s 8-11.

One thing seems to be true no matter what—ice or not—gravity always wins!

Quick sidebar: I’ve been doing a special art program (that the school runs for all of the grades) for Nolan’s K class and for the month of April I presented some info. on Monet, showed his famous lily pad paintings and then had them create a special art project related to the month’s theme. We did a combo of oil pastels and water colors and the kids loved it.

Holy cow—it has been a year of the silly bandz. If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about click HERE for a description. I don’t remember how many jelly bracelets I had back in the 80s, but I think Nolan has me beat!

The goldfinches have arrived—yeah!

I took another photo class…and had the opportunity to go to my favorite photo teacher’s home (in boondocks, WI) and play with his ultra fancy (and expensive) lenses. This photo is one of my favorites that I took with my favorite lens (a 17-55mm w/soft focus in macro) Anyone have an extra $1,300 they wanna give me so I can buy this lens for myself??? :)

Grandpa Sam and Grandma Kathy were here for Mother’s day weekend and we stumbled upon an amazing Mother’s Day brunch—on the lawn and away from the outdoor heaters. Some how we came and went and I didn’t manage to take even one photo! We also made it down to Madison’s zoo—and to our surprise everyone else had the same idea! We’ve never seen so many people at the zoo, but we aren’t usually there on the weekend either! By afternoon it was hot—in the mid-70s and very sunny! We also noticed that Madison’s zoo’s foliage was at a different stage than the trees in our yard—it was like we drove into summer. It’s amazing how much lots of concrete can change things! Look at this poor grizzly… doesn’t he look hot to you?

We officially swapped Nolan’s bedroom and our home office room. We decided it was time he have a little more space. He also upgraded from a toddler bed to an official twin. Things are looking up! Thanks for checking the webiste still—6 years later. Have a great week!

Yep, I stood in the middle of the street for this one. The things we’ll do for the perfect shot!

My favorite angle I think…

We learned some interesting things about the TX state capitol while we were in state. First, we learned that the TX capitol is the largest state capitol in our country, but not the tallest. This fact seems to annoy the Texans and what seems to be even funnier is that the Wisconsin state capitol building is one of the 4 capitols taller than the Texas’. Oops? :)

So, these two picture have to go together and although I could have put 10 to complete the “story” series I had to cut down a bit. So here’s the cliff notes: Aby scored 2 goals at soccer game, which means we go eat ice cream. After ice cream the kids play on blue cow and make a new friend boy with blonde hair. Very quickly boy walks over to blue cow and tries to climb up. Eventually he pulls over chair, puts foot on tail and climbs onto cow. Nolan then climbs on chair uses other foot and in an awkward and almost injury causing way manages to get on top of blue cow. Aby, however, in an attempt to be ultra independent insists on moving the chair, or using different sides or angles, but doesn’t make it on top of the blue cow. After many attempts to reason with her and show her what they are doing they are still unsuccessful at getting her up there. We really thought..one of the boys was going to grab her butt and push, but that never happened! Anyway, at last Nolan convinces Aby that he will climb up there and then offer her his hands to help her get up—she finally accepts the help and finds herself on the cow. It was absolutely hilarious to watch. P.S. Check out Nolan’s hands in photo number one!

We spent Sunday afternoon at the Austin Children’s museum—and that rocked. Here Aby is making me something delicious to eat— although I think it turned out rather crunchy and plasticy.

Nolan made me some stew and he was giggling so hard I was worried to look in the bottom of the bowl and see EVERYTHING he put in there. (Sometimes it really is better not to know!)

Kelly and Nathan found themselves recycling more often than usual…especially with a squealing audience…

and we had some great family band moments…

“…twirl me in circles, daddy!”

Whose steak do you think will land in the sand first?

No, there’s no competition in our genes at all…

OMG—they opened the slide!!!! And it was really dark in there! giggles, giggles, giggles—let’s do it again!

This always makes me think of the Omniplex! So they don’t have speed blur behind them, but I kind of like them frozen in time. Funky!

Learning how to skip rocks from the pros…

Yep, that poor fishie is missing it’s little eyeball!

Uh oh…

are words even necessary?

“Watch this Aunt Natalie…”

“I have only one leg!”

A well loved light pole…

One reason never to get rid of anything!

Now, seriously. What’s with the missing letter “i”? It’s not like one more letter is going to be too long for the sign or anything like that. It’s kind of like Oklahoma’s Git-n-go. Why does misspelling the word “get” make it a faster stop? Can someone explain this to this okie turned midwesterner???

Oh yeah, this was the “traveling bar” that was indeed traveling so fast I could not get a clear photo of it. Maybe that’s where the letter “i” went!

Hmm…interesting…

Yep, we are a visitor…now if we can just get on that duck boat with nobody looking….

QUACK!!

Yes it was monstrous and yes it was really expensive, but it was really fun—and thank goodness for fast reflexes to avoid wet lenses!!

Yep, they’ve done it. They’ve built a building that looks like an armadillo—complete with an armadillo tail!

Another picture???

What a great trip! That’s all for now—what a double post. That should make up for some of the gaps…shouldn’t it? Coming up next? That would be my crazy 6 year old in full/complete hockey gear!!!

Welcome to Austin, TX!

We went to a park with free roaming peacocks…and I found myself wanting to spend the entire day there!

The kiddos enjoyed the park too.

Even the dads found something to keep themselves busy—yes, they are both holding cans of the drink called “Rockstar”.

I offered to take a father/daughter picture and although big bro thought he’d be funny with the arm—the picture turned out beautiful!

We found an extra person hiding in ours!

The 2nd plane to TX was bumpier than a Jeep on a gravel mountain road and that meant that 1)the motion sickness (and vertigo) symptoms weren’t going to leave me alone for a few days and 2) Kelly would be the adult riding in the backseat…for the whole week!

Nathan took us to his favorite Friday night hang out. It was a market, a restaurant, a live music stage/sitting area and a playground. What else could you possibly need?

Oh yeah, it also had large birds that swooped down at your food or landed on your plate for a quick bite if you weren’t looking! (yes, that bird has a french fry in it’s mouth!)

We took a brief tour of the outside of Aby’s school—and checked out some of her work on the window.

The kids loved clowning around on the school’s playground and…

Uncle Nathan left some souvenirs behind (a red frisbee and a pink soccer ball up high in the trees branches and a little skin tissue in the tree’s bark!)

The states are painted on the basketball courts…and Aby and Nolan had a fun time finding Wisconsin and Texas—man I had to zoom out to fit Texas in the frame!

“Anything you can do I can do better…”

Kelly got his moment with the fairly new Stevie Ray Vaughn statue—one of his favorite musical icons.

I had the kiddos transcribe thank you/appreciation letters to their parents…oh, maybe I was a little biased…:)

We went to Aby’s soccer game Saturday morning too and I am glad she was playing and not me—as it was hot and sticky that day…

but she didn’t seem to notice! (Maybe it was knowing she’d get ice cream after scoring those two goals that helped keep her cool!)

And OF COURSE we had to fill up on incredible TX barbeque—I could smell it in the air the moment we stepped off the plane!

Even Kelly got his fingers dirty with a few bbq slathered ribs…

and found him self on the crazy side of the table again!

“Anything you can do I can do better!”

You didn’t think we were going to bbq only once did you? Check the signage out—is there anything they don’t sell?

Bring on the sauce!

We played Scrabble almost every night that we were there. This board was our game from the very first night—check out my game starter with “Lobsters”!! That netted me over 70 points! Take that dictionary man…:)

“Anything you can do I can do better…”

We balanced out the bbq with a very tasty french breakfast! Aby ate like normal and Nolan ate his plate, some of mine and some of Kelly’s—we have no idea where he put it all!

Just north of Austin we took a tour of the Inner Space Caverns. The openings were huge, with large rooms and tall ceilings. It was incredible. Aby and Nolan both took the chance to leave a little bit of their body oil behind.

Yes, that looks like homemade ice cream, but it’s actually all rock!

And of course it wouldn’t be a complete trip without a great sunset! Thanks for a great week big bro!! Enjoy the pics and I’ll have part II up soon!!