SoCo Field Trip

We rarely eat out of the house mid-week, and we even more rarely travel out of our neighborhood to the more Austin-y areas of Austin, but tonight I just spent the most lovely few hours with my boys on the fun and fabulous sidewalks of South Congress.

JP called on his way home from an afternoon swim lesson to ask if pizza sounded good for dinner. As he well knows, pizza ALWAYS sounds good, and since it was Spring Break and the weather was beautiful and I felt like being a little crazy, I suggested we head to Home Slice on Congress. Within an hour JP and Landon were waiting out in front of my office and together we headed to SoCo with all the windows down.

Because we are no longer hip and with it (though really, were we ever?), we'd completely forgotten that South by Southwest was going on, so the streets were packed and live music was coming from every direction. While walking from our car to the restaurant Landon paused in the middle of the sidewalk to throw up his hands, tilt back his head and dance. He was feeling the music- his feet were shuffling, his hands were waving, and several (probably intoxicated) SXSW'ers and St. Patty's Day parties stopped to clap for him. I really miss that total lack of self-consciousness that you have as a child.

After eating some of the best pizza in Austin, we continued on our way up Congress, listening to the music and stopping Landon from enthusiastically petting every dog we passed without asking the owner first (we're working on this, but the child fears no canine). We stopped at the Mighty Cone trailer for some seasoned fries (absolutely delicious- some of the best fries I've had in a while) as a post-dinner snack for the baby, and then stopped at Amy's Ice Cream on the walk back down for dessert for JP.

It was a perfect evening- the kind of Spring night that reminds why I don't hate living here even though ultraconservative nutjobs do things like remove Thomas Jefferson from history textbooks because they don't like that he coined the phrase "separation of church and state" (never mind that he's the AUTHOR of the Declaration of Independence and that whole separation thing is GOOD and IMPORTANT, especially if you are a religious person and the changes are so ideological and frequently factually incorrect that I am left embarrassed and stuttering by my home state for a whole new set of reasons). But back to my lovely evening.

Landon was so fun. We've really reached that point where he's such an easy, fun, and giving member of our family. Rather than just being happy to get through an evening out with a child in tow, the whole experience is really more enjoyable because he's there. We're about to screw this all up again for about two years by adding baby #2, but for now I'm just enjoying the fact that we can sit down at a pizza place without a single extra child-related item, order off a regular menu, watch Landon drink from a regular cup and eat off a regular plate, and laugh as he talks non-stop about his trip to the lake house and how "daddy went on the jetski but he went TOO FAST and it WASN'T SAFE and I didn't like it and I slept next to Uncle Egick and I was very quiet and he didn't wake up!"

We finished off the night by tucking a sleepy Landon into bed and then hanging up almost everything in the baby's room. JP was super excited to be wielding a hammer under my close supervision at 9:45 at night, but now the butterflies have taken flight and the room is nearly finished. Pictures soon, I promise.