last of the summer photos

Girls in Baltimore at Rehearsal. . .at the Zoo!

 Here I sit in the corner of the girls' room, the loud complaining fan blowing away by the window.  The two littlest girls are asleep, and this is our last night of summer, for tomorrow school starts.  Finally, after a barrage of questions about school and tarantulas, they calmed down enough to fall off to sleep.  I thought I'd take the opportunity to publish the last of the summer photos, absolutely late, and without much accompanying script.  Tomorrow will be a working day, and one in which I hope to return to some personal discipline; tomorrow I will not be able to publish photos wholesale in this helter-skelter way.

Oh, a yawn.  Elspeth still holds herself alert.  Give it a couple more whines of the fan. . . .

There are a few episodes absolutely missing from this line-up: one is the wonderful visit of Martin's family, and the other is our vacation to Oregon.  My camera recorded none of this because of the advent of Martin's cell phone, which we discovered takes as good, or better photos than my camera, and gave me the excuse never to charge my battery again (I finally bit the bullet and did it, though, in a rare moment of determination!)

Those of you who know us well enough to care about the following photos, enjoy.  Those of you who are nice people but could give a rat's tooth about wedding photos, skip this post and tune in tomorrow, when I will get all good and sensible and thoughtful again in my sudden solitude.  Or perhaps I will be so stunned by the silence that I will be able to do little more than stare at the mountains and shove a bowl of kibble at the dog with my foot.  Time will tell. 

Mother of the groom, looking snazzy on day of the big event

Um, the bridal party, or the youngest of them, anyway.  The ring bearer, my nephew Josiah, hung in there pretty well--we kept peeling him off trees but his expensive rental suit made it until after the wedding when he climbed up onto the roof of the getaway car and came back down covered with lipstick.  Don't ask.  It was not a pretty sight.  We were glad he was not eighteen and slinking into the shadows in that state--shirt untucked, tie askew, hair ruffled, smeared with lipstick.  At ten, those signs point to one thing; at eighteen, something else entirely.

Luke, the groom (my brother Kenton), my Uncle Ken, who did a bang-up job officiating, and you-know-who

If Bea had given any cuter of a pose I think she would have turned into a pillar of sugar.

The beautiful bride whom I now love to call my sister-in-law, Leah!

Dear Catherine visited us for a wonderful week

Merry filled her first official cupcake order, for a sixteenth birthday party!  She told me "Merry's Wee Cakes" are taking a break for now so she can concentrate on Middle School.

My sistas in PA & me before the rest of the summer passed and I got fat on wine, cards, and junk food

Elspeth in a rare moment of actually looking AT the camera, after her newest and very exciting acquisition: curlers.  She loves them.  She awakened the day after this one with smaller curlers in her hair, which when released, made her look just like Shirley Temple.