overlooking the Rose Garden:

in the Butterfly Garden:

enjoying the Children’s Garden:

I’ve been to Zilker Botanical Garden lots of times before, but what struck me most on this visit were (a) how accessible the bathrooms are. When you take preschoolers for a morning romp through a big garden, bet that you’ll be making frequent trips back to the bathroom, and know where the quickest paths are; and (b) all the Texas native plants growing in part shade to shade at Zilker: Texas mountain laurel, Texas redbud, even bluebonnets blooming happily in the shade. Very inspiring for this gardener who works in a shady backyard.

Still on our Spring Break bucket list, made in collaboration with the kids over breakfast this morning: gardening, baking chocolate chip cookies, baking pretzels, swim lessons, park playdates with friends, going to the library, watching our cat, watching our dog, washing our car and washing our hair.

While Nathan attended a zafu-sewing get together this morning, the kids and I ventured out to Boggy Creek Farm in SE Austin.  The air was cool and comfortable, the sun was gentle and we had a wonderful time.  Ben and Maddie carried baskets around the market tables.  They each chose sweet potatoes, and Maddie chose a green cabbage.  They split a freshly baked croissant while we waited in line to pay for our veggies.

After veggie shopping we watched chickens, and Ben and Maddie picked blades of grass to feed them through the wire cage.  We saw veggies growing and leaves composting, and we ran races alongside a row of fennel and lettuce.  Sweet, nourishing times.  Those sweet potatoes are in the oven now.

Prickly pear

Some kind of sotol? or yucca?

Deer track in our campsite

Great Blue Heron, on the lake near Devil’s Waterhole

Camp kitchen

Cooking pouches of camp fire apples on New Year’s Eve!

Playing “sink or float?” in small pools of water in the gneiss rock

After dinner

Pencil cactus

White-tailed deer

Playing in our campsite while Nathan and I broke camp New Year’s Day

Happy New Year, friends and family.  Here’s to continuing the adventure in 2012.

Here’s Ben’s finished creation:

And here are some of his friends’ gingerbread people.

I don’t remember who made this one:

Or this one:

But here’s Beck with his decorated gingerbread:

Here’s Margot with hers:

And here’s Kate’s:

What?  Ahem.

It was a great party; we were happy to attend and to celebrate the whimsy and imagination of the winter holidays with our preschool friends.  Hope you’re all enjoying holiday parties that warm and inspire you, too.

We decorated our Christmas tree this afternoon, just the four of us.  Then we went out for dinner at a new Indian restaurant near our house.  Then we drove around looking at Christmas lights, while the children enjoyed the dum dums that the owner of the Indian restaurant kindly gave them when we left.

If I could bottle today and save it forever, I would.

Maddie Roo in a patch o pumpkins:

(Who declined to wear a costume at all this year, sharing that she “might be a little bit scared.”)

Ben, post-trick-or-treating on Halloween night: