31 Awesome Things in 31 Days: Thing #20—The Inaugural Summer Nelson's Frozen Custard

Chocolate & chopped almond concrete. The best.

Last year's Thing #9 was the Inaugural Summer Snowcone, a tradition we have been planning to carry on everyday this week. And it is officially hot in Lubbock again, with temperatures reaching 101 degrees. Each time we've tried for snow cones, however, our efforts have been thwarted by a lack of time and the more urgent need to get Hollie fed, bathed, and put to bed. Yesterday proved no better, but we were determined to at least get to Hobby Lobby in order to stock up on future Awesome Thing crafts (top secret crafts! I'm giving out no secrets here!). Yesterday Holls came down with a cold that has left her extra fussy and sniffly, so there was that, too.

Hollie playing peek-a-boo while waiting for Dave.

Regardless, Hollie and I picked David up from school at 5:30 (dangerously close to dinner time for babies), and we decided to live life on the wild side by taking the sick and hungry baby with us to the craft store.

As it turns out, sick and hungry babies LOVE Hobby Lobby, so David chased her through the aisles of cheap but very breakable (and dangerously overcrowded) displays of kitsch while I gathered some necessary supplies for one of the above-mentioned top secret crafts. Then Dave and I swapped roles (one of our many family mottoes is "We Take Turns.") and I chased Hollie around while David gathered the necessary supplies for the other top secret craft. It was easy to find each other because Holls couldn't stop squealing with glee as she charged down the aisles pointing at shiny things.

Anyway, we would have hit up Bahamabucks for some snow cones at that point, but Target was our next stop and Nelson's Frozen Custard was on the way. Inaugural frozen custard it is!

So we charged through the drive thru, ate our ice cream in the car on the way to Target, and quickly snapped some photos of ourselves doing Awesome Things fast-and-furious style. There was no lovely sitting around at the park gazing into each others' eyes like last year, but hey: Life moves pretty fast. If you don't decide to eat frozen custard in the car every once in a while, you might miss eating frozen custard at all. (And yes, that is my terrible bastardization of a Ferris Bueller quotation.)

Dave said, "Quick, let's take pictures of us getting ice cream," but I didn't have my ice cream yet. So this is my "I don't have ice cream yet and you do" face.

This is David's "I have my ice cream already but you don't" face. He likes to get the cupcake-in-a-concrete one where a whole cupcake gets tossed into the mix. He's always disappointed that there's not more cakey bites, though.

Hollie refused to eat any frozen custard, so we bought her some sandals at Target for her "treat." Poor little sick baby. What she really needs is some good food and some good sleep, but this baby hates to eat and sleep when she is sick. I'm currently listening to her unsuccessfully falling asleep in the next room. It's breaking my heart. I hate feeling so helpless.

Hollie with her new shoes. She's not really interested in picture-taking when she's feeling sick.

She is, however, very interested in having little flowers on her sandals. 

Bonus picture: Hollie likes to play with the Photo Booth on my computer, so we were taking pictures to send to David during his class yesterday (payback for all the cute pictures they always send me when I'm stuck at school), and Hollie burped midway through the photo shoot. We've taught her to cover her mouth and say "excuse me" after burping (which she thinks is a super hilarious concept), so this is her post-burp. Poor little sniffling polite baby.

Quilt update: Three more rows sewn and no curse words! David gave me the brilliant idea of just sewing straight through each block and tying up the ends rather than trying to reverse stitch (which is what causes all the clogs and bent needles). I'm using a slightly less heavy thread this time, too. 

I also started reading (for my qualifying exams) Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies about some women putting together a quilt only to find that their box of materials is actually a box of fragmented manuscripts. So they end up sewing together a bunch of little stories (that are actually quite terrifying and gruesome—at least the ones I've read so far). I'll finish it tonight. It's one of those texts that no one has thought to publish since the eighteenth century, so I have to read it online (with those long s's that look like f's. I love those). Anyway, it's been a nice accompaniment to my actual patch-working during my reading breaks.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I must go see about rocking a sick and angry baby to sleep.

David was going to blog this up, but I gave him the night off again to do more real work. We'll make him blog next.

Thing #20: Welcoming in the first real summer heat wave with a frozen treat = ACCOMPLISHED.