The Dog/Guinea Pig Days of Summer

Hi everyone, Sophie here.  Two of my siblings, Harrison and Bella, are allergic to dogs.  They are allergic to other things too.  They have been on allergy shots for awhile and my sister Bella really wants to get a dog for our family.  So this summer we have been earning "doggy dollars" to get a dog.  Bella has also been dogsitting for friends when they are on vacation.

This is our friends' dog Titan.  He is a labradoodle and a good dog.

This is Buc, another good dog that belongs to friends.  He is an American Bulldog.

This is Tulip.  She is a schnoodle (half schnauzer half poodle) that we brought home from a shelter to see if she might work out as our family dog.  Unfortunately, it did not work out.

Bella was really sad about it, so that brings us to this little cute guy.  This is Zack.  He is our new pet guinea pig!  He is really sweet and cuddly. 

So now we have two parakeets and a guinea pig.  Some day we will find to right dog to add to the mix.

In other news, we have done some fun activities recently.  We painted these cool pictures at an art studio.  It was a lot of fun!

They give you an instruction sheet to help you paint and there are workers at the studio to guide you along the way.

We also went to a place called Sky High Sports, which is basically a room full of connected trampolines.  There are even trampolines on the walls!  It was neat!

Lost Pines Part 2

The first post was getting long, so I decided to separate out the pictures from the water park part of the resort.  We spent hours playing in the pools, going down the slide, going around the lazy river, and relaxing by the water.  I could have floated around the lazy river forever if left to my own devices.  Just give me a smoothie and an inner-tube, and I am good!

       

Return to Lost Pines

Three years ago, we stayed at the Hyatt Lost Pines resort just outside of Austin in Bastrop.  We had a lot of fun then and decided to go back for a few days this summer.  We left the morning of the 5th and returned the afternoon of the 7th.  With the kids a little older, it was even more enjoyable than our first time there.  We will definitely go again in the future!

Set in a forested landscape along the Colorado river, the resort has an elegant country feel to it.

It was hot, but the big shade trees and pool activities helped cool things down.

They have tons of planned activities for families and kids, like horse-drawn wagon rides.

There is a basketball court and a tether ball pole by the river, and we played some mean games of tether ball each evening we were there.  Let's just say that a few tears were shed based on who won and lost the games.

They have real horseback riding and river rafting along the Colorado, but the youngest ones weren't quite old enough to do those activities yet.  Maybe next time.

We had fun making colored sand art.

And making tie-dyed t-shirts.

I had never made tie-dyed shirts before.  It was fun!

The human hamster balls were a huge hit!

Though the kids were a bit dizzy by the end of their turns.

Whoooaaaa....

T-bone and Ribeye are the two resident longhorns at the resort, and they were there the last time we came.  They had grown just a tad in three years!

The kids had fun sitting on top of them and pretending they were cowhands.

Harrison really got into character.  He even pulled on the reigns, which they told us not to do (he tends to "not hear" those types of warning) and started the animal moving.  Thankfully the trainers intervened before he was thrown like a rhinestone cowboy into the adjacent tree.

Little Em jumped right up despite being half the size of one of the horns.  Bella decided just to pet the longhorns.  She did not want to get on top, especially after Harrison caused T-bone to jerk.

We also had fun playing glow-in-the-dark tennis and eating s'mores around the campfire, though we didn't get pictures of those events.