Spring play days

It's been such a lovely spring so far. The garden is growing like crazy, and we finally got a mower to deal with the grass that just seems to shoot up a few inches every day.






Cousins Jenna and Michael came down this weekend to celebrate Ian, Scott and LaVonne's birthdays (all in the second half of March!), and they had a bunch of fun playing in the yard. Jenna even helped me plant some tomatoes and peppers.


Our friends Ryan and Jennifer hosted a crawfish boil for Ian's birthday, and Julian loved playing with AND eating the crawfish. With his dad's help, he even figured out how to tear off the tail all by himself.



We're enjoying the 75 degree days while they last. We should have another month or 6 weeks of nice weather like this before the blazing heat sets in, but at least the Greenbelt is full of water so we'll have our beloved swimming holes back!

Riding the rails

For an upcoming story for the paper, I took Julian on Austin's new MetroRail commuter train. It was free this first week, so everyone and their mom was riding, too. (Literally. There were way more kids and parents on the train than I expected.)

Julian is obsessed with all things transportation, so he was thrilled to ride the train up to Highland Mall. There are tons of problems with the train (no weekend or midday service, no benches at the stations), which I'll cover in the story, but all-in-all, we had a great time. Plus he got to play with one of these cardboard MetroRails while we had to wait for another train. (The first one of the afternoon leaving downtown was full 15 minutes before it was scheduled to leave the station.)

Taking an artist's date at the Modern Museum of Art in Fort Worth

A few weeks ago, we took a weekend trip to see Ian's brother and his family in Fort Worth.

The 3.5 hour drive up I-35 is enough to keep us from going up there very often, even though there are a ton of fun things to do in the DFW area.

But every time we go up there, I promise I'm going to go to one of Fort Worth's incredible museums, and I've never booked the time to do it until this trip.

So on a rainy Sunday morning, a day after we took both families to the Forth Worth Zoo, I drove my happy little self to the Modern, which is considered to be one of the best modern art museums in the country. I relate to contemporary and modern art far more than traditional art forms, so you can imagine my delight when I showed up to the museum to see signs advertising a Warhol exhibit.

Before I'd even walked in the door, I knew the effort to take an artist's date with myself had paid off.

The Warhol exhibit was fine and dandy, but nothing compared to the museum's permanent collection. The building itself is striking, a design from Japanese architect Tadao Ando that was complete in the early 2000s. The glass-encased building is surrounded by water that during my entire visit was beautifully speckled with rain.

The most memorable piece was a set of 32 photos by Nicholas Nixon called "The Brown Sisters." Each year for the past three decades, Nixon has photographed his wife and her three sisters standing side-by-side, their stoic, determined gazes saying as much as their journal entries from the same period of time.

Here's what I wrote in my own journal while captivated by the images:

Four sisters, from young girls who've just lost their innocence to wrinkled, wise women. They grow determined over the years, holding each other, rarely looking at one other, but always connected together in some way. Their clothes change, but more so, the style that comes to identify them. How one always changes her hair and the wily-haired one doesn't, not even once (However, it does gets more unruly by the year.). You see none of them with child (or at least not visibly), but it's as if you can see the husbands and the children come and go, and through it all — the jobs, the houses, the triumphs, the losses, the once-trendy jackets, blouses and accessories — they have each other.

Here's an image of all the pictures, but I haven't been able to find a gallery where you can flip through them to get the same frame-by-frame journey as seeing the piece in real life. Nixon, by the way, is still photographing the women once a year.