Baby Tuesday

Now this is really Baby Tuesday.
Baby C had made very little potty progress since yesterday, let's not talk about it...



bathtime irony


Here is Baby C playing in her apple tree trunk in the beginning stages. It's about half done, and she's already slept over night inside it. Big hit.
It still needs branches and leaves, which are only a a few jigsaw/x-acto knife cuts away from becoming a reality. Also to trick it out, I plan to upholster the inside and poke christmas lights through the leaves so that it lights up as a giant nite-lite.


Yes we did go to Yosemite and here's proof!
Ok, this is Oakhurst, pretty darn close.
This photo captures the general pattern for our stay:
Babies C, E and V all played together rather quietly and nicely and Baby R got into trouble.


Oh and anything that was big and grown-up looking, he needed to
pick it up,
carry it around,
drop/throw it,
and carry it around some more,
and then leave it far away.


But he's so cute.


You can kinda see the valley view and the koi pond behind them here.


Give us a big Sierra Mountains cheese!


Baby V and Jenna, our gracious host, whose life my family and dogs probably subtracted minutes from after our stay.
I mean Frankie-the-sprinkler is enough to drive a person bonkers.

Halfway up to her house, I realized that I had forgotten to load the port-a-crib in the car. I almost fainted at the wheel. And I thought "this is bad" but I really had no idea how bad Baby and Baby R would be when a crib is taken out of the equation. Horrid. And if it weren't for the blessed Baby Van Gogh DVD that Jenna had that I played for them to get them to calm down, it would have been worse. But all of us probably only got 2 hours of sleep all night.
So at 6am we were already on the road to the nearest Wal-Mart to buy a port-a-crib. Now I have a total of 3 port-a-cribs, but it was worth it. The next night, total peace. I think I might have seen a rainbow and heard a choir singing from heaven.

Speaking of driving. Have you ever been given directions but then mapped it online instead and used those directions? Have you ever done that and then it goes disastrously wrong?

See illustration below:


I should have know that when the instructions tell you to drive for 45 minutes on something called "Road 600" it's not a good sign.
It means a robot is telling you to take a hike, because I not only passed through the remote old west towne of Raymond, but I also reached Crazytown and Cuckooville.
It was one of those roads that I couldn't imagine why they built it.
There's nothing there! Do the coyotes and skunks need a two lane [incredibly windy] road?

It was so confusing and sign-free that I had to call Kevin 3 times to have him look up where I was an how to get back to civilization.
And so windy [WHINE-DEE] that Mojito* threw up 3 times.
If I hadn't had my laptop playing a movie for the kids in the backseat. I might have pulled over and cried.

But yes! we saw Yosemite! We saw Bridal Falls spittling out water, since it's late August and there's about a swimming pool's worth of water in this whole dry kindling state.
And we picnicked under El Capitan, and Baby R just wanted to play in the bear proof trash cans and the giant boulders and collect more owies.
We came, we saw, we bought a t-shirt (for Baby R).

Rewind a bit to the 80's party.

Arapaho Elementary, that's where I was in the 80's so I wore the shirt!
(Thanks Robyn, it's actually yours I think).
I'm wearing legwarmers, but you can't see 'em.
Even the kids were dressed for the occasion.
I asked Kevin to shave his goatee into a mustache in honor of Tom Seleck, can you tell?
I couldn't stop laughing at it.


It was mostly a pool party, as far as the kids were concerned.


Mad/indignant face. I get this look alot.


Bubbles, but no heat. Note the purple lips on the kids.


Hey, tattoo.

*Kinda funny story. When the dreaded Rd 600 spit me out on Hwy 41, I had missed my turn and wasn't in the right spot so I needed to ask directions. I pulled over next to this woman, about my age, feeding her horses and putting their blinders on (I think, I wasn't really sure what those mask things are for).
But since Mojito was carsick, I had to pull him out of the car with me and hold him, or else he could barf some more in the car.
So I walk over to her with a chihuahua on my arm, after getting out of my new black SUV with bay area license plate frames, and asked her for directions.
I kid you not, she looked back at me, scowled and continued tending to her horses silently until they were completely set up. And then she walked over to me and flatly gave me directions. And I wanted to say "I know this looks bad, but I swear I'm not a prissy city girl."
I mean, I am kinda, but I'm not a Jimmy Choo, teacup pomeranian city girl.