Well it’s 1:19 AM, according to my computer clock (12:19 per my hotel clock), and I find myself in Austin, TX again for the second time in three weeks. This is very atypical for me and even odder still that I find myself traveling to Austin three times in one year when there is an entire world of IBM sites that could be beckoning but Austin has been dubbed the mecca for IBM design and thus the reason for my frequent trips.

It’s tough. Not too long ago I was on a trip with my family and so I always feel strangely melancholy taking the same buses, standing in the same lines, waiting in the same terminal now, without them with me. Knowing I would be gone for a few days, I decided to spend as much time today as I could enjoying my kiddos and making some memories to boot.

It turns out today was the school fieldtrip. It was rescheduled from a day last week it was supposed to rain, it turns out it never did and while we didn’t have rain today we did bear the brunt of a lot of rain over the past few days – turning the event – at a pumpkin patch into a quite messy, muddy ordeal. However, mud, dirt, water, nothing will slow those kids down and I was just along for the ride. As much as I thought today was going to be very tough – trying to keep two kids with different interests focused on the same things since there was only one of me – I knew this was likely going to be my one and only time that both Connor and Cailee would be on the same fieldtrip at the sametime in their lifetime. In the past it’s been just Cailee and next year she starts Kindergarten so it will just be Connor.

We had a great time, the highlight for Connor was definitely the tractor, while Cailee really enjoys the corn crib and feeding the cows corn from the corn crib. We all picked out pumpkins, we didn’t lose Connor’s car in the corn crib (I consider that a huge success), Connor only fell in the mud once, we enjoyed the hayride, milking the fake cow, feeding the goats, and sliding down the corrugated pipe slide. I mean, what more could a kid want?

Post fieldtrip, Cailee had her five year old checkup at the doctor. She got her kindergarten shots so now she is all set for school (only has a wait another year), and she passed her hearing and vision test with flying colors (last year’s results were a bit suspect but I always thought she just didn’t understand what they expected of her in the tests so my theory was proven correct). She’s in about the 70% for height, weight and BMI so the Doctor declared her perfect in every way possible – but that’s not telling us anything we didn’t already know.