LBJ Ranch

I wanted to get out and do something as a family during spring break since we had been busy for a month with packing, moving, and trying to set up the new house.  Carlos had the idea to go to the LBJ ranch and I thought that sounded like it would be interesting.  

After an hour and a half drive we first stopped at the The Sauer-Beckman Farm.  It is a working farm set back in the early 1900's.  The people who "work" there are dressed in the time period and do all the chores of taking care of the animals and cooking in the time period.  It was neat to tour the house and see the volunteers doing their chores.  They even made some food we were able to sample.  

The Lyndon B. Johnson Ranch had a lot to explore.  

As we were coming in, there was a one room school house that we visited which was set up as it had been when Lyndon B. Johnson had learned to read there as a child.  

Along the drive there was also a family cemetery and a replica of the house where LBJ was born that he remodeled to be a guest house.   

The LBJ Ranch, also known as the Texas White House, had been set up as an alternate presidential command center when he had been president, with a landing strip for Air Force One and all of the required communication infrastructure.  It was really neat to tour the house set back in the 60's time period.  We couldn't take pictures in the house, but we did outside.

 

 

Peanut Funeral

We knew that the end of Peanut's life was not far off.  When Kylee got her dwarf hamster she read that they typically only live for 2-3 years.  He only lasted a month in the new house.  The kids were pretty sad, so we had a funeral and burial in the back yard.  We buried him wrapped in tissue in a tuna can casket.  Kylee was worried animals  might dig him up so we put a large flagstone over the grave.

Here lies peanut, the greatest hamster ever.  He was my first pet.  Rest in Peace.
Jan. 1, 2011-Mar. 9, 2013.

Kylee's writing about Peanut the hamster. 

Frisbee golf

There is a frisbee golf park just a few minutes from our new house and Matt was excited to try it out.  When Cynthia came to visit with David and Mauren to look at houses we decided to give it a whirl.  Matt bought some frisbees and off we went.

Matt bought five frisbees, which apparently come in different classes with varied sizes and weights depending on the distance desired.  He got a variety so it was a little tricky when everyone picked their frisbee.  We all have plenty of room for improvement, but we had a great time.

Last visitors

Right before we moved, we had a few last visitors.  Mamaquel and Grandpa Whetten came.  We took them to the house we were in the process of buying and walked around the outside and peeked in the windows.  

We also had Grandma Mindy come for a quick visit and showed her the outside of the new house too. 

old / new house

When we moved into our first house on Coral Harbor in 2003 we didn't expect to be there long.  We thought we would maybe be there for the four years of Matt's residency training and then move on due to being in the military.  It ended up that because of the specialty Matt chose we would be moving back to San Antonio after a fellowship in North Carolina, so we decided to keep the house as a rental so we could move back in after fellowship.  We revised our plans to live there for a few more years to save money and when Kylee was getting ready to go to middle school we would move.  Though we loved our elementary school, the middle and high schools for which we were zoned were not great. 

When Matt and I started looking at houses, we knew it would be a while before we were in the market to buy one.  We wanted to find the perfect house in the best location and were prepared to take several years to look.  We narrowed down a few neighborhoods that we wanted to be in.   We were pretty low key for our realtor.  He didn't really look for houses for us, he would send us all the houses for sale within the area and price we wanted. We would look at all of them and we would let him know the houses that we were interested in seeing.  He would make the appointments and we would go check them out.  If the house was great, the yard wasn't.  Some of the houses had great yards, but not enough bathrooms.  I was surprised at how many houses that were pretty good size and only had 2 full bathrooms.  Matt had seen a house that he liked listed in October and he liked it.  He decided in December to see if it was still on the market.  It was, so we decided to check it out.  The minute we stepped in, I liked it.  The more we looked the more we realized it had all the things we had been looking for.  Everything was great.  There were many things it had that we hadn't seen in other houses.  We decided that evening to put an offer on it. It had been on the market several months so we were discussing how much less to offer when our realtor called.   The seller's agent had told him there were 2 other offers.  Worried we would miss out on the only house in nearly two years of looking that had almost exactly what we wanted, we offered 5 thousand more than the list price.  We were thrilled when it was accepted.

Julia's Winter Wonderland Party

Julia's birthday lands in the middle of the crazy Christmas Season.  To not add to the craziness we had her party on January 19th.  She wanted a Winter snowflake theme.  I had fun getting stuff together to decorate and use for the party.  We hung snowflakes through out the house.  In their take home goodies the kids got a pail with bubble bath, bubbles, a fun straw, and a snowflake ornament.  I was able to find a pinata that kind of looked like a snowflake.

We played some winter themed games.  They had a race of dressing up a snowman.  They used toilet paper to wrap a team member up and put on a hat, scarf, and gloves. 

They also had a relay race of balancing a cotton ball on a spoon and they had a snowball fight.  They had to try and get all the snowballs on the other teams side.  They had a lot of fun throwing them.  

Those that attended the party from left right:

Brayden, Brant Jensen, Blake, Katie Mason, Cameron Jensen, Brienz Dahlke, Julia, Brooke Ball, Kylee, Andrew Mason, and Ryan Jensen

Since Matt had made a pretty fancy cake on Julia's birthday, we decided to go the easy route for her party.  We bought a rainbow cake that was pretty fun.  

Career day round #3

This year Career Day at Bob Lewis ended up being in January instead of at the end of the school year.  I was able to take the day off to participate.  I requested Julia's class since I had done Kylee's and Brayden's classes in previous years.  

It was fun talking about eyes with Julia's class and the other two classes that rotated through the room.  Both of the other two presenters Julia heard from were military, one of them in the medical field.  He brought blue gloves for the kids, which was a hit.   

Having taken the day off from work, I was able to pick the kids up after school and I saw a bunch of first graders sporting their new roll up sunglasses I had handed out to the classes along with their fancy blue gloves.

Brayden's favorite was a parent who worked at a radio station.

A week afterward I got a nice certificate of appreciation and a manilla envelope full of thank you notes from the kids.

My favorite one was Julia's.