While my husband is off doing Army stuff for the next month, the kids and I are visiting my parents in the Jemez Mountains via New Mexico's Highway 4.  This beautiful area of the state is slightly north and west of Albuquerque. 

On Memorial Day, the Jemez Pueblo hosted a pow wow.  The Pueblo is generally closed to the public, but the pow wow was open to all.  We arrived and wandered past most of the booths.  My mother and I each bought a necklace and my dad got a silver bracelet.  From there, we headed over to the food area and got Indian Tacos (with red chile since the green was rumored to be smokin’ hot) and ate them sitting under a pinon tree.  Just as we were finishing our tacos, the pow wow started in earnest and all the dancers made their grand entrance into the ring.  I put E on my shoulders [...]More

1. 

   
   The setup - if you're driving in, free parking is usually only a good stroll away. Look for a municipal public parking lot, or a regional transportation parking lot.  Better yet, if you can walk, go for it.  This time, the walk was part of the fun, as we spotted floats and marchers headed towards the parade's start and tried to guess what they were marching for.
   
   
2. Whoever gets the most flags wins - flags? Always in fashion - and now available in a variety of styles and colors!  Look for parade volunteers walking the route with extras,

[...]More

"Now I look cool," she said as we left the zoo.  The cool factor was up because of the large foam bat mask she was wearing. 

It's hard to carry a bat.  Especially a 30 pound bat.  But we'd trekked all over the Philadelphia Zoo, it was lunchtime, and this particular chiroptera wasn't having it any other way.  Prior to becoming a bat, she'd been a hatchling egret, a tree frog, and a number of barnyard animals.   She'd watched the giant tortoises pace across their pen, and had yelled "Ew! Stinky!" and then burst out laughing each time we neared the elephants.< [...]More

I'll get back to our ongoing love for the nation's zoos later.  What has been recently been brought to my attention is that, given a few fuzzy free-range creatures and a few hours, our toddler can happily run amok with her friends.  A local "farm" (non-working, more a small menagerie, located in the middle of what has become suburbia) drove that point home on Saturday, thanks to some baby goats, chickens, and a very patient pony. 

There were no interactive exhibits; there was no sound and lighting design. This was a barn and several pens in the middle [...]More

I think that every Mother's Day since my son was born, he and I have traveled somewhere.  This year our family went to a wedding.  This entailed driving for 4 hours, attending the 30-minute ceremony, chatting over cocktails for 30 minutes, and driving 4 hours back.

I'm pretty sure that was my son's longest car trip, but he did really well.  I took a tip from TWC author Steph and purchased an iPod Nano, then loaded a couple movies on it.  We didn't use it on the way out, because he was too engrossed in the big trucks and tractors and cows and horses.  It was just the ticket on the way home, though, [...]More