Picopter Pants and other tales

Now that life is falling into place a bit, I am returning to doing things that I enjoy, such as working on projects planned for before we moved to Austin.

Case in point: I bought some helicopter fabric from Superbuzzy (do I even need to link it anymore?) back in August to make curtains for Harlan's room. It turns out that the blinds in there don't offend me as much as I originally thought they would, and the kid is totally, completely, obsessed with what he calls "piecopters". There are quite a bit of piecopters flying around Austin for some reason. We have even seen two of them make landings on near by hospital roofs (there are about a trillion hospitals here for some reason. They all have special purposes too, like the heart hospital, the children's hospital, the eye hospital, the trauma hospital, the big toe hospital, and the eyebrow hospital). I broke out the fabric and made Bub some pants that he refuses to take off:


I also recently bought him some frog rain boots at Target which he is quite fond of wearing:
This is the outfit he picked out today to wear to Ikea. We went there to pick out new bathroom supplies because we are finally getting the bathrooms renovated, hooray! I will post before and after photos when the work is finished. The bathrooms are way too gross now to simply post before photos. Seriously. If you thought our balcony looked like Sanford and Son's, you don't even want to know what's in the loos.

Harlan's latest obsession besides piecopters are pillow houses. We discovered pillow houses last week over at chez Ellen & Brennan. Their sons pull all the pillows from the house together and dump them across the living room floor. They then proceed to throw themselves on top of the pillows and one another. For, like, hours. It seems to never get old. They like to be buried in piles of pillows and pretend to be chickens coming out of the eggs too. That's good times. Here they all are at Harlan's first pillow house:

And here is Harlan at home with his own pillow house. Please note the pillow I made from Superbuzzy fabric!
Doesn't he look just like a newborn chick?

Here are the guys at a trip to the zoo last week:
And here is a lousy shot of an amazing band called the Quebe Sisters. You can listen on that link.
They are a family with three sisters who all won Texas fiddle contests (one is the national champ as well) and they sing the loveliest harmonies I have heard in years. Plus, you really can't beat triple fiddle.
If you're wondering how we got to see a band play, just notice the playscape (that's 2008 speak for "jungle gym") structure behind the tent. The local fancy supermarket has a restaurant and a huge deck and playground (with a heart hospital right on the other side! And the hospital that Ladybird Johnson died in, one block away) attached to it. On the weekends they have bands play for free outdoors so that suckers like us with kids can pretend we still have social lives. I don't want to make all of you who are freezing feel jealous, but it does feel pretty awesome to spend a winter evening sitting outdoors in a light dress and watch the sun set while drinking a margarita and listening to a kick-ass live band play. Did I mention the playscape behind the tent where Harlan is happy to run amok for two hours?


And now, I am introducing my new blog collection of local bumper stickers. Here are the best of the past week.

Irony and humor:


Scaring you away from hell with the threat of an angry and wrathful God:


That's right sistah:


Whatever it takes to keep you away from the devil: