Geography: Inner-Space Caverns

So, I had just emailed Debbie and told her all about how I’m looking forward to getting back to our geography posts, when I realized this post I have planned is all about geography.  It’s the geography of our local area, and this local cave.

 

About 30 or so years ago they were drilling to make sure the area was strong enough to support an overpass, when they kept hitting air pockets.  Well, lo and behold they discovered there was a cave down there.  So a few years later Inner Space Caverns was born.

The top of course has the usual museum gift store, designed to lure your kids in to spend money on things they’ll forget about in 5 minutes.  But, the cool part is the second picture.  They had several display cases of fossils they’d found in the caves and what they think they are.  The kids were fascinated to see a mammoth jawbone and dinosaur bones where they could almost touch them.

To get down into the cave you take a trolley down, sort of like a super fancy mine car.  The kids of course thought this was super cool.  Our guide was pretty tolerant of having so many pre-schoolers along, I think he thought it was preferable to the tours of elementary kids that everyone else was dragging through.

 

 

Most of the formations down there are called living rocks.  That means the formations are still being created as the water drips through the porous rocks.  Texas is made up of mostly limestone and similar rocks, so we get all sorts of weird formations.

These are called soda straws.  They’re hollow tubes formed by the interaction between the water and the rocks.  If you broke them off you really could use them for straws.  It’s not recommended because, it’d taste bad.  And, besides it takes 100 years to get an inch of growth on one of those straws.

 

The guides have all sorts of clever stories to tell about the rock formations.  As you’re standing there you really can see the stories they tell, and the things they say.  And you take the pictures, of course later on looking back I can’t remember what story this was.  I think this looks kind of like a dragon, and that glowing light is his eye.

If you look way up there, that little dark spot in the middle of the picture, more or less, is the bat we saw. Of course my brother is playing it up like the bat is going to kill them, and they we see it and it’s maybe two inches across.  Seriously, there’s some times that brothers need to be beaten.

 

 

Part of the way through the cave there’s this whole series of pictures of animals.  They had to add in a cement wall to prevent mud from flowing in and collapsing the cave, and they commissioned an artist to recreate as paintings the fossils they’d discovered here.  So you can see, they discovered a horse, a bear, a tiger, a camel, a mammoth, and some kind of anklyosaur (I think).  The last picture was put in to give a perspective of size.  The first picture is more of the fossils they’ve discovered.

This picture cracked me up.  So, this cave was discovered in 1963 (I may be off by a year), and they called this room the lunar landscape because they thought the moon would look like this.  Of course, we’ve since landed on the moon and discovered it doesn’t look anything like this.  But, I think it’d be much cooler if it did.

 

I wanted to get more pictures, but my camera was dying, and Chad offered me more batteries, but they didn’t fit my camera for some reason.  So, I gave up on getting kid’s reaction shots, because by the time the picture took they’d left the view screen or I got blurs.

Edited to add these two pictures: Yes Uncle Sean was there, and for once he wasn’t the Uncle scaring/revving up the kids.  See Uncle Chad there in the corner of that second picture.  He kept scaring the kids.  Bad Uncle.  He was also a bad big brother who tried to feed me to a tarantula when I was five.

 

If the kids had been older this would also have made a great science lesson.  But in reality, this was more of a “caves aren’t scary” lesson.  They were all excited to go in when it was theoretical, but once we were in they spent most of the trip asking when they could leave.  Not so cool.  Oh well, I enjoyed it and laughed at the bad puns and the silly jokes.  The kids were there……..

 

Head on over to Debbie at Children Grow, Children Explore, Children Learn to see what others have done with geography this week.  I’m thinking I’m going to put continent studies on hold for now because it’s seeming a little much to tackle, but I’ll probably come back to it more later on.  We’re powering on in our state studies with Colorado, because our cousins are from there.

Stash challenge, or handy excuse to show off my recent work

Since I’ve been doing a lot of drawing recently with working on illustrating the Bible stories we’re in theory studying at a snail’s pace, I’ve been trying to figure out a good method of carrying the various things I need for it with me, so it’s portable, but still findable.

 

And here’s what I came up with:

 

So, that’s my pencil pouch for drawing it all up.  It’s got a divider in the middle, and on one side I put my pencils, erasers, and pens, on the other I put the papers I’m using for drawing it all out.  I put a strap on it so I can hook it up to my notebook, but I’m not as sure about that.  I end up detaching it when I start drawing, so long term I probably won’t use that part.  Oh well.

 

 

Do you like my messy dining room table?  I thought about making a production and cleaning it off, but I got these pictures a night or two ago and was tired.  That’s my project today I think, clearing the dining room table.

I kind of made this up as I went along.  I had these left over squares from a skirt I made a few years ago, there’s 12” finished squares just made of all sorts of blue cloth I had on hand.  I sewed two of them together to make a 24” long thing, cut one in vaguely half, and sewed it together, and then sewed pencil lines.  Honestly, it’s not all that great.  I should have put a bit more time in finding a pencil case tutorial because I was guessing at pencil size, so my first several “pencil holders” don’t work because the size isn’t big enough or is too big.

 

But, it’s functional, and some point soon I’ll be making another 3 or so because there’s these six greedy eyes that keep trying to steal mine.  I’m missing some of my super special Mommy’s only pencil…….

 

So, that’s my project.  I like it.  It’s fun.

So, where did I go wrong on this recipe?

I was all set to finish strong on this challenge, I didn’t make it through every chef like I wanted, but I was going to try  my best gosh darn it.

And then I got to the list of recipes, and they kept having ingredients I either don’t have a clue where to get.  Where do you get vanilla beans?  Or ingredients I don’t particularly want to have in the house given my young kids and their penchant for getting into cupboards and opening stuff (so that eliminates any pound cake, no rum or tequila).

So, I ended up with his French Meringue recipe.  I thought, no problem I’ve made meringue’s before, this should be just fine.  And I’m having some women over for tea, and we can snack on the cookies and I won’t be left with lots of them.

And then the plan went wrong.  How you ask?  I’m glad to tell you.

First, we had an ER trip because Superman came inside telling me he’d stuck a seed in his ear and it wouldn’t come out.  Luckily, Jeff was nice enough to come and bail me out on that and he sat with the silly boy as they got the popcorn kernel out of his ear.

The, once I was actually working on the recipe I was convinced that I was using my eggs that were bordering on going bad, and there was a couple of the eggs in the dozen that were bad, but I forged ahead.

And finally it wasn’t forming the stiff peaks you need.  I was whipping it and whipping it and it wasn’t forming the peaks.  I know I was thrown by everything being in ounces, so the measurements might have been off because I was using the measurements on the side of my liquid measuring cup, so that might have been off.  But, it still wasn’t forming peaks, and usually after a couple of minutes of my mixer beating on high it’s formed peaks.

So, where did I go wrong?  Oh, and I convinced myself that I’d been using bad eggs, so I went through cracked them all, dumped them down the drain and took the shells to the garden.  Then I came back to get what I thought was my new carton of eggs I’d bought on Monday only to discover it was a mostly empty carton of hard boiled eggs, and I’d just thrown out my new eggs.  So, I made Earl Grey Shortbread cookies for everyone and we devoured those.

Here’s the recipe, maybe someone knows what I did wrong.

Ingredients

• 4 egg whites
• 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar, optional
• 4 ounces sugar
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 4 ounces confectioners' sugar
• 3 ounces nut powder, optional (Nut powder is equal volume by weight of confectioners' sugar and a roasted nut of your choice. I like hazelnuts, peanuts, or almonds).
• 2 ounces cocoa powder, optional

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
In a mixer, begin to whip the egg whites with cream of tartar, if using.. Slowly add the sugar. Whip the whites until stiff peaks.
Combine flour and confectioners' sugar (and nut powder if using), then fold into whites.
Load batter into pastry bag (use open star or any desired shape IF NOT using nut powder otherwise use no tip), and pipe quarter size meringues onto grease free parchment paper. Bake for 5 to 7 minutes until browned. Remove and cool before use.
Pipe buttercream from cake assembly into some of the meringues for a surprise.
Apply meringues to the cake after applying a heavy crumb coat. Cover completely. Put fresh berries or dollops of cooled, piped chocolate ganache between any gaps of the meringues.


Anybody, Bueller?  Anyone from the I Thank My Mother  Cooking challenge?

We play with our cousins!

 

We’ve had cousins here visiting because of Mom’s wedding.  So, last Tuesday we decided to load everyone up in the van and go to Zilker Park, one of the super cool parks in the area.  I think I’ve taken my boys there about a dozen times, and not even scratched the surface of it.  Mainly because we never make it beyond the playground and the train.

 

We started our day at the park with a picnic because we got that late of a start, but it was all to the good because the park was crawling with kids on a field trip, so our little preschoolers would have just been overrun by the big first and second graders.  Then we headed into the Splash! exhibit.  If the kids had paid any attention beyond being able to look at cool stuff and run through a dark cave, they would have learned all about our local aquifer and how we get our water.  But, they mainly cared that they could push buttons.  In a few years however…….  A potential science topic.  Right now, fun buttons to push.

 

Then comes the obligatory trying to get a group picture of five kids, none of whom want to look at the camera at the same time.  Instead we got lots of yelling and putting fingers where they shouldn’t be in pictures. 

 

Finally after much impatience the train is ready to leave and we’re off for our thirty minute ride around the parts of the park we never go to.  And I apologize to Aunt Dawn and Princess, but I don’t have a good picture of you on the train.  Princess you were either frowning at me or like in this picture you were closed.

 

Little cousin had a lot of fun playing on this great big fire engine.  I have no clue if it was ever a real one, but they sure loved it.  And he took his shoes off.  We’re not really sure why.

 

 

 

 

 

And what’s a trip to the park for my kids without an injury?  This time poor Superman took the honors, and I was a mean Mom who snapped a quick picture before running over to rescue the poor guy.  I think he had a scrape, which was dubbed worthy of a band-aid.  Every little thing needs a band-aid.  I think the air bumped me, I need a band-aid.

 

 

 

But, even with the injury everyone had a fun time.  They played on the playscape for a good long time, and no one got seriously hurt.

 

And don’t forget even with the most wonderful playscape of all, you still need to have some plain old running around and digging in the rocks.

 

And what’s a better way to end the day than with ice cream?  So, we stopped by Dairy Queen and had a blast eating ice cream.  Yummy Reeses Peanut Butter cup blizzard for me, and dipped ice cream cones for them.  In order, Princess, Batman, Big Cousin, Superman, Little Cousin.

 

And after the cousins had been dropped off they got their five minute nap on the way home.  All in all, probably a near perfect day in my kid’s minds. 

It was only one slice of cake

     

One slice of cake, we only gave her one slice of cake.  That’s the timeline of how she went from nice and clean to filthy in less than 2 minutes.   And in her brand new outfit from Nana, no less.

 

Linking up to Mamarazzi Monday