Bakersfield, February 2009

I love taking pictures in her frontyard. They always turn out so timeless....

We were off to visit Aunt Louise & Uncle Carl last week. Louise picked us up in LA and we had lunch at the Groves, Farmers Market (one of my favorite places). Then we were off to B-Field to cram in all my other favorites: Smith's, Dewars, Sweet Surrender, WoolGrowers. Detecting a theme....All about me? Sort of, but really it was for the kids. Emily, Billy and Abi got to spend some time with their Cali cousins Chloe and Gwen and their Great-Grandparents and be kings of Aunt Louise's castle for a week. They had a blast and I should have taken more pictures, but I didn't.

We inflated a tall queen sized air mattress for them to sleep on (in front of a TV, you do what you have to when it comes to a quiet bedtime in a strange place!). Only the mattress apparently had a slow leak and at some point in the night I noticed Emi climbed into bed with me. I glanced down at Billy and realized the mattress had lost a significant amount of air and had swallowed poor Billy! He was buried in the middle of the partially deflated bed and nearly invisible to anyone standing over him. So, I figured the right thing to do would be to go lay down there on the floor with him and my weight would displace enough air to bounce him back to the surface....Genius, considering it was sometime in the middle of the night and it would have made WAY more sense to just put him in my perfectly comfy bed with Emi and we all could have a decent nights sleep! Should have taken a picture of that scene. It was reminiscent of when Billy rolled off the back side of his bed in the night and all you could see were his hands in the air "I'm stuck."

The rest of the trip went something like that, really well, but kind of chaotic. We went to services at Aunt Louise & Uncle Carl's rockin' church on Sunday. Emi, Billy and Chloe were turned into three little piggies at their class and Abi got a sweet thank you note from her class. What is to be noted here is that I dropped my kids with complete strangers at church we don't normally attend and didn't get paged to come retrieve any of them!

Happy Valentine's Day!!

On Tuesday Aunt Louise treated all the girls (and Billy) to a day of pampering. They got to go get their hair curled at Avery's salon and all dressed up in new clothes for a photo shoot that afternoon. In spite of how crazy it can be to take 5 kids anywhere add to that a photographer and the pressure of perceived happiness and it's enough to make anybody crack. The kids did great though and we actually got some good pictures and fabulous memories from it. Notice what serious business being beautiful is to the girls....then take note of Billy's face!

Abi, wondering if she was ever going to get her turn to be fancy....

Then, not so sure she wanted it afterall!

Hard to tell in this small of a picture, but he is grinning from ear to ear.

We had a great time the rest of the week, we baked, we shopped, we ate! We had a tea party for the girls with my Great Grandma's china on the front porch. Pinkies up! On Friday Aunt Louise drove us into LA, to Mom (Grandma Trisha), and we had lunch and did just a bit more shopping....Then we were off. Homeward Bound.

Thanks for the hospitality. We had a great time!