Day: January 2, 2011

The big event on Wednesday was the musical called Scrooge, based on the book by Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol.

We didn’t do much that day before the musical, Sonja did scrapbooking and photo-blogging, and David, Andy, and Leilani went for long walk to the mailbox (and a small waterfall).

We did dress up for the big night out:

The musical was put on by a small company of actors, all volunteers, at the Georgetown Palace Theater, in a town north of Austin.

Leilani was very scared in the beginning when the ghost of Marley visits Ebenezer Scrooge–and it was very scary. But she could hide under Sonja’s shawl, and then the other ghosts weren’t so scary. Parenting tip: it is not possible to make a scared child talk quieter, they will always be loud. In the end, she loved the whole show.

Non-flash photography was allowed, so I took some pictures of the show for Leilani to remember. The set was very well done, the music was a live performance, and the acting was great. They even had children throughout the show.

Here, Scrooge is seeing all the people who will be happy when he dies–except he doesn’t realize why they’re happy. If you look closely, you can see the ghost of Christmas future up on the balcony.

In the end, Scrooge is a changed man who become generous and loving. Here he’s dressed in a Santa suit and giving presents to everyone.

After the show, the actors come out in costume to talk with the audience.

After leaving the theater, we walked around the main square of Georgetown, a thriving little town full of shops, and not all of them antique shops. They still had their Christmas lights on:

A book bench outside a bookstore:

That same night, when we got home, Leilani somehow managed to avoid going to bed right away so she could draw a picture. She drew a picture of Scrooge, in his pyjamas, just when he becomes good, with money in his hand to give to people. I think this was Leilani’s way of dealing with the big, complicated story, because she captured the climax of the plot. I also like how her picture included the stage lights, to show that she also understood it was a play with acting, not real and scary:

The next day, she gave the picture to Grandma and Grandpa to thank them for taking her to the show:

It started out like many mornings this vacation, with a late breakfast of Grandma’s steel cut oatmeal:

For the activity that day, we decided on the Inner Space Cavern, not too far to the north. While waiting for our tour, Andy looked at the map of the cave, thinking of caving in his youth:

Meanwhile, Leilani found the playground:

And Jim helpfully recorded the unconventional story of the cave–discovered by freeway:

The visit starts with a short tram ride down into the cave, only 30 feet (10 m) below the surface:

The blue lights in the background indicate passageways where the cave continues:

There were lots of little rooms and passages with neat formations, here soda-straws:

Flowstone:

And draperies:

From the beginning, Jim and Andy started lagging behind to take pictures:

Sometimes we caught up to take group photos:

But then we fell behind again:

This was the biggest room of the cave:

At the furthest point was little room with 3 pretty lakes, with colored lights for effect:

This one is called Half-Moon Lake:

Another short tram ride (for effect) back to the surface:

Out near the playground, they had sluices for people to “discover” gemstones hidden in dirt sold inside. Sonja and Leilani and everyone else ended up finding little pieces of colored rocks in the gravel all around:

That night, we went on another parent’s night out. We went to a closer, vegetarian restaurant and then to see the movie Tron. When we got home, Leilani was still watching her movie with uncle David and Grandpa Jim:

We were flying out on New Year’s day, so this was our last day in Austin. Sonja was up late the night before dealing with a blog crisis for her customers, so we slept in more than usual. We didn’t plan any activities so we went for a nice walk at the Walnut Creek park just down the street. It’s a beautiful forest area with lots of trails and creeks.

Leilani and I (Andy) wanted to show Sonja this waterfall we saw 2 days before. Then there was a ribbon of water flowing over the large flat rock and into the pool below. Now it was dry. But Leilani could still throw rocks into the pool:

She carried bigger and bigger rocks and threw dozens of them–sometimes I feel bad because she’s contributing to erosion and filling the pool with rocks. And it was a pretty pool that reflected the forest:

We hiked for a while on the maze of paths, trying to find the river crossing. At one point, an off-leash pit-bull prompted Sonja to pick up Leilani. So this was a rare (and short) ride on Mommy’s shoulders:

For some reason, this picture reminds me of one 4 years earlier in the same area. Maybe it’s the tights:

A pretty dry creek-bed:

The point of the hike was a big playground for Leilani. But she got upset over the wrong kind of monkey bars and didn’t have that much fun. She did play a little before it started getting cold and late.

On the way home, we took a different path. The stream was difficult to cross here, Andy carried Leilani, David got a foot wet, and Sonja went barefoot. Later, Leilani wanted to play on the crossing stones, but broke her stick and had a melt-down.

More of Andy’s art:

Back at the house, Grandma’s Christmas decorations:

After making the Princess bags with Grandma and decorating them, Leilani insisted on filling them with goodies (chocolates) and giving them to people.

While Mommy and Daddy packed the suitcases, Leilani worked on her biggest puzzle yet. Actually, it’s not her puzzle, and she did have some help, but they finished it that night. Like I wrote earlier, Leilani is patient and matches colors and shapes very well to pick out the right pieces to put in:

Sunrise 1/1/11 (from the airport for our 8am flight home–tickets are cheaper on this flight):

I fixed, uploaded and named a lot of photos during the Christmas vacation, and posted them all today. I’m really proud of how fast the Christmas photos got posted.

Unfortunately not all old photos have been posted. The blog posts between September and this post were out of order and I changed dates on some of them, backdated posts, put brandnew posts in with old dates…. I’ll attempt to list them here, but it might be incomplete, as I reordered 8 pages of blog posts – 50 posts in all…

Completely new as of January 2nd:

Kauai 1
Kauai Parade
Kauai Party
Still missing: 1 or 2 Kauai posts
MNS
Mixed Photos November
Kelby and Belen’s visit
Ana’s Birthday Party
Sept October iPhone Photos
Sidewalk Chalks
Half Moon Bay
St Dunstin Fair
Halloween at MNS
Halloween Critical Mass Bikeride
Still Missing Halloween, Fairyland and a few others

Newer posts (late Decembeand completely backdated:
MNS movie
Spring and Summer movie

These got moved around a little, but not too bad:
Visiting Kelby and Belen
Seyons BD Party
Fall 10
Lunar Eclipse
Squirrly

actually, almost all posts got moved around that were posted between September and December

Take my picture….

All hand made and decorated mostly by Leilani, and all natural colors too. (Spirulina, tumeric, beets)






Leilani loves the fairy Elina… and Elina’s friends. Sonja bit bullet and bought the Barbie-Fairies

And some later additions taken by Leilani: