Monday was Liam’s second birthday. We had some friends over for punch and pie… I mean cake.

This was the very first cake I ever baked from scratch. It’s a four-egg butter cake, with whipped cream frosting and filling, which was also from scratch. That being heavy cream and sugar beaten profusely. It actually tasted a lot like pound cake, and wasn’t overly sweet. I’d say it was a success. The scary thing about making cakes is that you can’t really taste as you go, so you get to test it out on the people you serve it to. Good thing it turned out well this time!

Liam had a great time, as he always does when he has other little ones to play with. We didn’t get any pictures of them in action, though.

A couple weeks ago we went to a pumpkin patch in Flower Mound. Liam picked out his pumpkin and rode around in the John Deere Wagon. We all went for a hay ride too, which was fun! Stay tuned for Jack O’Lantern and Trick-or-Treating in the Square!

Saturday night after feasting at our (not-so-local) Brazilian restaurant, we decided to go for a drive to East Texas. I’d been wanting to see Tyler and the piney woods. We went home, packed a bag, booked a hotel room, and finally got out the door at around midnight. The theory was that the kids would sleep while we made the approximately 2.5 hour drive there, and we’d go look around the next day. Liam was very excited to be going on an adventure instead of having to go to bed, but he fell asleep quickly in the car, as did Grady. It was really nice going for a drive out in the country, in the dark with the music up and babies not making a peep. When we arrived, Liam popped up and set about making observations and “helping” us push the stroller up to the hotel room. The next day we checked out of the hotel and cruised through town. I have to admit that I wasn’t terribly impressed but we didn’t make much of an effort to find out what sights there were to see. Instead we opted to keep driving further into the pines.

There are so many neat little towns out in the heavily forested and gorgeously verdant, lightly rolling lands of East Texas. We wondered the whole time, what do people do for work way out here? And how do we get in on it?

Eventually we ended up at the Toledo Bend Reservoir, which is gigantic and ocean-like. We drove to the other side to fuel up in Louisiana, and while it was very tempting to just keep exploring, there were duties to be performed at home. As is evidenced on the above map, we did take an interesting and circuitous route back, though.

The red truck we parked next to at the gas station (below) had keys in the ignition. Apparently leaving keys in your car is pretty common around here. It baffles me that people do that, although it is somewhat comforting that there are still places like that in existence. Maybe there is hope after all.
We went back though Nacogdoches, which has a cute old town square, tons of Victorian gingerbread houses, and is home to Stephen F. Austin State University. After eating dinner at a family-owned Italian restaurant, we got back on the road home. It started to pour really hard, but by the time we had driven a little while out of Nacogdoches the rain had let up and soon vanished.

The most beautiful area we drove through was surrounding Crockett (check out their totally awesome website). Towering trees and swampy areas, small dirt roads winding away beneath shadowy boughs… my kind of place. Bet they can’t get cable internet out there though.

Liam was incredibly well-behaved though we drove for hours on end. He’s such a good traveler! Grady slept most of the time, and I’d climb in the back occasionally to lean over and nurse him. We arrived back in Granbury late in the evening, and as we drove over the glimmering moonlit lake, I was glad to be back home.