A Visit to the Asian Supermarket

I've always been fascinated with ethnic grocery stores.  The interesting sights, smells, and sounds make me feel like I'm Alice in Wonderland.  The other day, I took M and G on their first ethnic food adventure- an Asian grocery store in North Austin.  

To see some pictures of our time there, and 10 suggestions for fun things to do with kids at an Asian grocery store, see my guest post at Free Fun in Austin.

I let each girl choose a new food to try from the snack aisle.  G's choice cracked me up- dried squid.  hmmmm, I have to say, I'm definitely not used to such a fishy smell in my snacks.  It didn't become one of our favorites, but I was proud of both girls for giving it a try!

Blanton Museum of Art Scavenger Hunts

Here are three fun scavenger hunts for Austinites to use with their children at The Blanton Museum of Art.  

Animals

  Hats

Contemporary Art Pieces to Find and Color 

 By the way, don't bring crayons to use with this activity.  They won't let you use them (I found out the hard way), but colored pencils are ok.  

All of the pictures are from paintings or sculptures in the permanent collection, but bear in mind that occasionally, even some of those pieces go on loan to other museums.

I hope you have as much fun with these as we had the other day!

Museum Scavenger Hunts

Since Thursdays are free days at the Blanton Museum of Art here in Austin we decided to take a visit.  To make it more fun for the girls, I made up a pictorial scavenger hunt ahead of time by printing out snippets of paintings from the Blanton collections that I could find online.

I ended up making 3 different hunts:

1.  Unique objects (a book, or hat, jewelry, etc) from paintings in the European collection
2.  Animals from all over the museum
3.  A collection of black and white photographs of the very colorful modern art sculptures.  (The girls' job was to find each sculpture and color it the color that it appears in real life.)

It worked well.  I think they looked at the paintings more closely than they might have.  M enjoyed circling the pictures as she found them, and even G found a couple on her own.

I'll be tweaking the pictures for my particular scavenger hunts to share in another post in the next couple of days (in case any fellow Austinites want to use them), but I think the idea could work for other museums as well- especially small museums or ones with smaller collections of paintings so it is not too overwhelming for small children.

Strawberry Picking

A couple of years ago our family had a wonderful time at Sweet Berry Farms pumpkin patch. Well, last week the girls and I went again- only this time to pick strawberries!One especially fun thing about the farm where we went was the abundance of animals for the kids to pet and feed after we were done picking strawberries.
To find a farm for strawberry picking near your location, Pick your Own is a good resource.

Free Family Fun in Austin: Bats Under the Bridge

I just love exploring a location to uncover all of the interesting places and events that can be enjoyed for free or inexpensively. Our family has lived in Austin, Texas for a little over a year now, but before last week we had never gone to see the bats make their nightly emergence from under the bridge downtown. (And not just a few bats either- 1.5 million of the creatures live under that bridge, making it the largest urban population of bats in the world!)

It was definitely something interesting to behold. Just before sundown the bats began to flow out from under the bridge in a steady stream, and remained clustered together in a dark, silhouetted trail that reached across the sky for miles (pictures don't do it justice).

It turned out to be a very pleasant and unique family experience. We arrived at the bridge about a half an hour before sundown, and so had time to take a stroll by the lake during that golden hour before dusk. Then we found a place to sit together on the lawn and listened as the high frequency bat noises grew louder and louder and a few began to trickle out from under the bridge. For the next fifteen minutes or so they continued to fly out, and we chatted and watched.

Apparently, March is not the most exciting time to view the bats. (There aren't as many as there will be as the summer goes on). I imagine we will go back another evening later in the season to see them again.

Does your hometown have some frugal, unique activities or locations? It would be interesting to hear about them!

Our Memorial Day: Peach Picking

I just love the opportunity to discover fun, family-oriented day trips around Austin! This Memorial Day we took a trip out to Fredericksburg, a rural, historic German area known for their delicious peaches.This peach season was a little sparse due to a bad freeze earlier in April, but we were still able to find Pesnik Farms, a u-pick orchard with plenty of peaches to pick. M carried the basket and thoroughly enjoyed picking the peaches that were low enough for her to reach. Once she discovered that she could also EAT the peaches, her enthusiasm knew no bounds! (It was hard to keep her from taking a bite out of each and every peach in her basket)I'm very much looking forward to making a juicy cobbler out of these peaches.
After we had picked our peaches and chatted with the farmer for a little bit, we headed into town to an old German bakery for lunch. With our stomachs full of German pancakes, reuben sandwiches, and German pastries, we sauntered back out into the town and of course, couldn't resist stopping in at into a used bookstore where the books were all 30% off.
A very nice afternoon for our family!

The Cathedral of Junk

Sometimes the best places to visit aren't the ones most widely advertised or the most expensive. I happened to run across an allusion to The Cathedral of Junk on the internet and thought it might be an interesting place to visit. We took some visiting family to go see it this past weekend, not knowing what to expect, and it turned out to become one of my favorite places to explore of all time! (It's hard to capture the scope of it here in the pictures) The Cathedral of Junk is not an established museum or tourist attraction- just a man here in Austin who has built an exquisite, quirky masterpiece out of several tons of junk in his backyard. The admission is free (but accepts donations); and it doesn't have set hours (just whenever the man happens to be around and available (so it's good to call ahead of time).I was thrilled to find such an unusual, fun place to take people for free right here in our hometown.Have any of you had similar experiences, discovering inexpensive off-the-beaten path, fun things to do with your family? I'd love to hear about them- especially so I can file them away for times when we might happen to be traveling through your part of the country!