Hangin' with Flat Joey

As you may remember, growing up my very best friend was Karla French. Karla and I drifted apart in high school, and I hadn't talked to her in ~20+ years - until recently! Karla (now Karla Mancini) found me via a website called Facebook. It's been really great catching up with her and seeing photos of her family. Well - her six year old son Joey is doing a 1st grade class project based on the book Flat Stanley, about a boy who is made of paper. Joey, who lives in Michigan, needed to send "Flat Joey" to another state for a visit. Apparently Joey loves Texas, because Sandy on Spongebob is from here too (who knew??!). :-) So Flat Joey came for a little visit. He arrived like this:Of course he needed to be dressed up in proper Texas attire, so I turned Flat Joey into a true Texan with a little cowboy outfit:Today Carter and I took Flat Joey out to see some of our favorite things around Austin. A visit to Austin in the spring would not be complete without a photo in the bluebonnets!!Next we took Flat Joey to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library & Museum. It's a really nice museum, and best of all - it's FREE! :-) First Flat Joey posed with LBJ himself (in bronze):Flat Joey got to see a replica of LBJ's desk in the Oval Office.And he hung out in the Green Room of the White House for a bit.There's currently a very cool space exhibit at the library called To the Moon: The American Space Program in the 1960s. As both a Senator and then President, Mr. Johnson did more to facilitate the rapid progress of the space program than any other American leader. Flat Joey got to see the actual Mercury 7 space capsule:He also went to the moon!In addition to the museum, the building is also home to all of the documents Lyndon Johnson kept during his political life. And there are lots and lots of them! Carter's Aunt Laura works where researchers come to view the documents. She also helps when documents are being declassified and released to the public. She's even gotten calls from Brian Williams' staff - he happens to be quite an LBJ buff! (Laura correct me if I'm getting anything wrong here!) Here are some of the boxes you can look up at while you're down in the museum:Thanks to our insider tourguide (Aunt Laura!), Flat Joey was lucky enough to see one of these boxes up close and personal - maybe he jotted down some notes for an LBJ memoir he's been working on? (ETA: Since Flat Joey is *not* LBJ, I suppose memoir was a poor choice of word here, oops!)After all of this touring at the library, Flat Joey was hungry! Carter took his new friend to lunch. He can't visit Austin without going out for some tex-mex, now can he??We had fun spending our morning with Flat Joey - tomorrow he's headed back to Michigan so Real Joey can hear all about his adventure! Thanks for stopping by today!