Stroll In The French Quarter

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There Goes The Neighborhood

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Superhero Pajama Breakfast

It's Day One of What The Hell Are We Supposed To Do With The Kids For Two Weeks. And to completely out do themselves in Waking Up At Ungodly Hours On A Weekend Or Holiday, both kids chirped into the bedroom, ready to play...at 5:45 in the morning.

Five Forty Five.

On the bright side, I got in to the office at 7:00 a.m., and the CEO passed my office on his way to his, so total points.

Jennifer has the kids today while I vacation at the office. And she started off with a bang: a trip to the kolache restaurant in pajamas and masks. Go Matou!

Along For The Ride

Several months ago, a good friend and colleague recruited Jennifer to ride on his team in the MS150 Alamo Ride To The River, a bike race going from San Antonio to New Braunfels and back to San Antonio again. Like other members of the team in hot pink and blue polka dots, she prepared diligently: by riding a cumulative four miles five days before the race. How great did she look?

I took on the role as unofficial team cheerleader which is to say that I went along the route and took pictures and said "y'all are doing great!", and then met up with the team for drinks and dinner.

There were some beautiful vistas along the way.

But the most beautiful sight was the thousands of people who donned unattractive shorts and rode miles and miles (and miles and miles) in order to raise funds to eradicate Multiple Sclerosis, a cruel and chronic, often disabling disease that attacks the central nervous system (which is made up of the brain, spinal cord, and optic nerves).

That silhouetted photo was of a woman as her husband passed by, her daughter in her arms waving. He was representing the United States armed forces.

The same team finished up, most of the team made up of disabled veterans. Who rode one hundred fifty miles. There was not a single person sitting as they crossed the finish line.

The kids had been with my mother in San Antonio, but I picked them up, just before nap time, so help me God, so we could be at the finish line together as their Matou crossed. I'm so glad we did.

It was fun being a tourist in my own hometown. Maybe next year, I'll actually ride.

Taking This Tenth Day of Advent To Talk About...Halloween

You may think this is late, but listen, considering the last several weeks, this is called ALMOST CAUGHT UP.

One of my favorite bloggers is Sweet Juniper. I love him because he's totally the kind of guy I would have wanted to marry, you know, had I turned out straight. He's witty, artistic, smart (both because he was once a lawyer, and because he later had the smarts to leave the profession to be a stay at home dad), and he (and his wife) make cool stuff, like the dog wagon, and this pegasus costume.

So one day mid-summer, when I asked Mateo what he wanted to be for Halloween, and he answered "STARGAZER!", the name of the UNICORN he loves so much, the unicorn we had purchased for Harper as just compensation for Mateo getting some new train track pieces, and I said "You want to be a unicorn?" and he answered, "No, a pegasus!" which was what Harper now had, a hand-me-down from a coworker, I said OK! You'll Be A Stargazer Pegasus!"

Which meant that Ms. Everything Is A Competition also wanted to be a pegasus.

I mean, sure, Sweet Juniper didn't exactly have a tutorial, and sure, we were in the middle of showing and selling our home, but he had said that it only took a couple hours for a couple of nights and that the whole thing was less than $20.00. Dot. Dot. Dot.

The wings were made by hand-drawing a wing over nine (NINE!) sheets of 8.5" x 11" paper, then scaling (slightly) by measuring the kids' arm length so I would know where to place the handle for the flappable wings. SIDEBAR: A co-worker and I were talking a bit ago about how when we have super-mom moments, it's usually because we used a work hour (granted, our lunch hour) to do mom things and I said I'm actually using my lunch to blog about the pegasus costumes! And she's all, well don't forget to mention that you outsourced the cutting of your wings to me and it was 74 pieces of paper. So there it is. Except that it wasn't. As you can see in the photo. It was just nine. Using the drawing, I formed the wings with 16 gauge electric wire and then reinforced with 1/4 inch dowels and a shitload of electrical tape. I then attached the wings to a cardboard frame with tie-wraps.

On the other side, I created a 'backpack' formed of PVC pipe to hold the LED light battery boxes. Too much?

After that, I softened the wings by putting quilt batting throughout the wing skeletons,and wrapping them with cheesecloth. I re-measured the wings, and cut out 8 pieces of fabric in the shape of the wings, turning them inside out to attach loops (for the light string), and then slipped the "sock" over each wing. The fabric edges were adhered to the cardboard and PVC backpack with fabric glue before threading the lights through the loops and dropping the battery boxes into their pvc pocket. In order to keep the boxes from falling out, I fashioned an encasement out of the same fabric and put some velcro so the frame could be kept closed. I ran backpack straps of elastic through the top and bottom frames of the PVC. After that, it was a few long nights of fabric glueing, I don't know, something like twelve boas to each wing.

The pants I made from white fleece and I put elastic at the leg bottoms so that we could pull them up as shorts if Halloween ended up warm. For the tail, I bought two $0.19 lei's from a party goods store and attached them to the pants with a safety pin.

I knew neither of the kids would warm up to a hooded head, so I decided to measure their heads and make pegasus head hats out of cardboard and packing tape since we had plenty of that around. I didn't like the way the prototype turned out.

So I made some adjustments. Like three-dimensional ears. I then sewed two pieces of white felt together and glued the ends inside the cardboard hat. All the head details were made using felt and fabric glue.

One thing I found was that after the eyes and ears were on, it kinda just looked like a dog head. So I went out and bought some black felt to create a 'shadow' of the shape of a horse's jaw line, as well as the nose lines.

I also used black felt make hooves by placing the felt over a shoe, attaching with velcro at the back, and then cutting around the shoe to make a shoe cover hoof.

There are a million places in the process where I should have stopped. Like when the boas alone were more than Sweet Juniper's entire costume. Or when the time I had spent on the project exceeded "a couple of hours over a couple of nights" by a multiple of A LOT. Or, ok, yes, the battery operated LED lights. But whatever.I didn't do a tunic top or any front hooves, opting for white already-owned tees instead. These pegasus' would be bipeds.

Jennifer asked me at one point "What if they decide at the last minute they don't want to be a pegasus? Will it hurt your feelings?" And it was that moment that I admitted, out loud, that this was not about the kids anymore. Ooops!

It was fun night. We began our trick-our-treating with our annual tradition of stopping off at Pastor Marilyn's house. We went on to a do a street's worth of trick-or-treating before coming to our resting place at a friends home where the kids helped pass out candy to the kids, and the adults passed out wine to their parents. Hellooooo, Halloween!

By far, Halloween at Three has been the best one ever!