Why it's great to live in Austin

The kids and I had tons of free entertainment yesterday all while enjoying an 80 degree temperature. In the morning, we went to Home Depot for the monthly free building workshop. This month, they were supposed to build Tony Stewart race cars, but they also got out some castle treasure boxes from an earlier month. Alex and Emma both chose to do the castles. It was a pretty neat project. Here is a picture of Emma's castle. She'll probably paint it at some point, but hasn't yet.

In the afternoon, we went to Explore UT which is billed as the largest open house in Texas. Every department on campus sets up special booths outside and inside all over campus. Here is a list of what the kids did this year: saw a car driven only by computers, made slime, decorated a mask, designed beautiful shields with lots of glitter, made an Eco-pot out of newspaper, Emma got on stage during the Chemistry Circus, built towers out of wood blocks, watched phone books stacked on egg shells, climbed through a fire engine, saw stuff under the microscope, and got wet from water balloons shot by a trebeuchet(medieval catapult). The kids had a great time. The weather was quite a bit warmer than last year, so the water balloons felt good instead of freezing. The Chemistry Circus was presented by Emma's former soccer coach so he picked her out of the crowd to come up and make pink goo. He also made thunder which was pretty cool with a loud bang and lots of mist. We did some of the same things as last year since Alex insisted he wanted to build a tower again. We did go do some new things as well, though. Next year, we'll have to visit another part of campus and do even more stuff.

This is the trebeuchet.

Alex's tower. He loves building them and then pushing them over.Emma had a ball climbing the mustang statue.

This afternoon, Alex and Emma each have a birthday party to attend. They're really looking forward to them. When Alex got dressed this morning, I was thinking about all the people that would see him today at the party. He was clashing horribly with light blue basketball shorts and a burnt orange UT shirt. I made him pick a new shirt so he picked another blue shirt that still clashed with his shorts. I told him they didn't look good together either. His response was "Mommy, that's what boys are supposed to do!" So the blue clashing outfit stayed after a good chuckle.