a week ago...

i have some pics from a week ago. it took me a looooooooooooooooooooooong time to upload the photos. so much so that my brain died and was replaced by a robot. i have little desire to accompany the clicks with words as robots do not feel. however, i will endeavour anyways because as r2d2 clearly demonstrates, robots are all heart.

last saturday i picked up evan at mom and dad's old place which is now his new place and we drove out to mom and dad's new place in langelee. there were a number of factors present in my decision to impart in this activity:
1. it was time to do something with evan, it being a couple of weeks at least that he had been living in my vicinity. it was time.
2. hadn't been to the new place yet. it was meet to see the land of milk and honey that had mom and dad in the throes of delight.
3. bethany and ben were there!

so upon arriving at the age-ed beet's home, i found that their little trailer was cute and bigger than expected and not only that, but it was indeed situated on a pleasant park like property. bethany and the beanlett were the only ones there. we hung out with her and i took these pictures of the slumbering, chubb enfolded bean-ini.

1.

i like his dragging lips and knit brow.

2.

it was a beautiful day and i was itching (no kidding. hello flare-up triplets) to meander the park-yard. we had already eaten elicit butterscotch puddings. what more was there to do inside?? so we convinced ma-bean to pick up babe-bean mid-slumber and we explored the property. the trailer is on a rise and it's park like settings are below it's grassy knoll with huge trees like islands in the sea of grass. there's one part that is full of skeeters, but once you break through their lines, you find a more open, dry sunny area and behind some bushy high weeds is a stagnant creek. apparently there are fish in the stag-creek. "dad thinks the grankids can go swimming in there." commented evan as we walked past. evan during this time of the walk was asserting himself as an expert in all things to do with babies. this was mostly for bethany's benefit, but just so he knew his place, i mentioned that i had changed his diaper. just between you and me and the world wide web, i dont' really remember doing this. i could have, but still i was only in grade 3 when he was a baby with a boil on his bum on the days that dad had no job and walked him for hours and gave him his medication in smithers. evan and i have a boil on the bum bond/club that no one else seems eager to join.

we sat in the back on the lawn chairs.

3.

bethany had to nurse and evan stated that he was an expert in having a wife who nursed. here are some clicks that i call context pics. we had to promise not to look as bethany got herself situated with the milk leech. (yuck! i just looked up leeches and found many things that i don't want to know, like there are land leeches, and that if you pull a leech off of you or try to burn it off or put some kind of substance on it to get it off, it's likely to 'regurgitate' it's stomach's contents into your wound before it falls off. also leeches found INTERNALLY in such places as your nostrils or a place that rhymes with the prairie town REGINA !!!! will need medical help for removal. "i think you should stop reading that." said edith when i told her of this. i'm sorry owen, you are no leech. leeches are yucky. i change that to milk glutton or something)

4.

it's not a kid playing ghost. it's bethany. yes she's a kid, but she's also a mom. what is with all these children having children i ask you?? :) ok she's an adult but at the same time a kid sister with a baby, so you see my difficulty with the terms, don't you?

5.

6.

while owen gobbled greedily, evan and i took some shots.

7.

8.

9.

10.

kitty felt like she belonged where the action was. that reminds me, while we were walking the grounds we would turn and there would be kittty bounding after us, like "wait for me guys!"

evan and i like how her tail frames his head in the pic below.

11.

12.

13.

i entitle this series "a boy and his cat" btw.

14.

remember when she was a fat raccoon lumbering over the kid gate on the balcony at neyland with big thuds? i do too. i love her.

15.

i think that's a classic evan expression.

16.

17.

it's blurry because kitty turned last minute, but i like the look on her pretty face.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

evan doing what experts do:

23.

owen had a spot deep in his inner neck folds that apparently smelled like grampa and renee's house. he apparently didn't like his private grampa and renee's smells being plummed. (is that a word?)

24.

brother, sister and babelett.

25.

26.

owen blatantly refused to wink. he's such a rebel at such a young age. "just wait until he's older" she (me, right now) said ominously.

27.

he has a cute round head.

28.

that weekend i was all about capturing 'flare'.

29.

30.

31.

they were singing and i was laying on the grass.

32.

33.

a mom, babe in arms.

34.

35.

i like this one:

36.

37.

38.

nitty gritty guitar pics:

39.

40.

41.

42.

i think the one below is elvis.

43.

this one is supposed to be jeff buckley but bethany took great offence to the lips.

44.

45.

(that's bethanowen in the reflection)

46.

47.

i like these two very much.

48.

"no one can make their chins disappear like evan can." said bethany. ok but i was the first to do it. at least give me that.

49.

50.

this one is purely for my vanity. i always did like seeing myself in reflections.

51.

i edited this one three different ways and liked them all. so i put them all in! woooo hooooo !

52.

52a.

52b.

53.

54.

55.

gritty, right? grit. now that's grit, mamma! says the old man as they sit on rockers on the veranda of their homestead.

56.

57.

58.

59.

i love love these next two.

60.

60a.

channeling james dean. ironically he later got a james dean inspired hair cut. no lie.

61.

62.

63.

when we got back from our nitty gritty shoot, we found mom on the phone with sarah with you know who chillin like a villian on her lap.

64.

65.

cute smile, hey.

66.

67.

so that night we were planning the infamous and not only that but notorious bonfire at boundry bay beach. evboo was coming too. when we got there we found a whole lot of wind and boarded up bonfire pits. luckily randy was a scout and so is always prepared. he also does a daily good deed but he doesn't want other people to know about that. anways scout randy had a portable one time only bbq in his trunk. just so happened to have it... it took some effort to get it going and shauna's newspaper came in handy, but once it was going, we huddled around it and made our hot dogs and later our smors, wrapped in tinfoil. then we went down to the beach. i took some more shots of ev.

68.

it was all about the flair here. i didn't think it worked at the time but later i found out it did and i was glad. i mayhave even smiled about it.

69.

love it.

70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

meanwhile the ladies were quite cold. edith demonstrates how to keep a blanket on without hands.

76.

she does do it with style, you have to give her that, even if you don't want to give her anything, you have to.

77.

hey it's me! harharharharharharhar.

78.

the water was like bathwater and much warmer than the air at that juncture.

79.

80.

i think my hair looks like it has a weird soft feather texture here or something. it doesn't look real.

81.

then evan was capturing some flare too. he's such a copy cat.

82.

83.

84.

us. is it just me, or doesn't evan's eyes look quite 'pretty' this way? little bit girlish? am i alone in this?

85.

after the non-bonfire we went to randy's to watch she's the man (we had just watched sydney white the day before with nachos of course, what else?) i had evan and claudine and declan in my car. ev was in the back with declan because they were best friends. well declan really wanted milk, so we stopped at mcdonald's to get him some. he also got a mcflurry. so he sucked back the milk quite quickly and then evan gave him a bite of the mcflurry. that's when things started to go badly. he turned away any other bites and spit up a little. evan felt there was more coming and sure enough as declan had both hands pressed against his mouth, erruptions occured. some squirted up into his eyes and some was caught in the empty milk container. the rest filled whatever space it chose and landed mostly on declan himself, but some beside him on the seat (and the artists way had a little baptisim too. haha). at that time we were almost at randy's, so when we got there they took declan up car seat and all up to be warshed. i felt we were a funny sight. declan in his car seat semi-reclined under a carpet of the remains of milk, watermelon and hot dogs, walking into randy's fancy pantsy condo lobby. while claudine bathed dex randy went down with me to clean my car. she really came off with minimal grodiness and didn't experience a lasting odor. claudine felt bad, but what can you do? upchuck happens. we then watched she's the man and enjoyed it immensely as is bound to happen with that movie.

next day was steak in langelee because whenever there's a shoults around there's bound to be steak. this time evan drove. we listened to rachmananov on the way.

a bean bath:

86.

note kitty in the background. note the flare. note bethany's pained expression. maybe it's the gnawed nips. who knows? evan would. he's an expert on these things.

87.

we played buzz word outside. here's pops.

88.

earlier i unwittingly began a family dinner argument. our family dinner arguments that last forever and ever and rarely fully die, are not about big or important things. they're on things that clarkes like to argue about. little points of niggling fact or non fact depending on which side you're on. this was the topic: is scotland it's own country? dad evan and i were the primary arguers but it quickly became a dad and evan duel. although they both at one time or other called the other stupid, they were chummy enough in this photo.

89.

after we played buzz word which is kinda fun, but harder than it looks, dad took us all, except ben and his baby offspring, who opted to stay home, to the mini kirtland temple site. dad and ben had spent long hours on sat helping to construct it. it's for trek. they have this whole movie set with frontier style buildings. it's in a big field with horses. it was fun. we reverted back to our siblings at home jostlings crying shotgun window seat etc. evan lost that one but tried to force bethany out of hers because he has the longest legs, but was eventually defeated. there was a feeling of giddiness. it was fun. we had to duck in between fence bars. most people took the middle one but bethany in a skirt took the bottom one on all fours. the sun was setting. a horse came running up to us and mom was scared and hid behind dad. dad's part of the kirtland temple was the base of the steeple and it looked quite sharp if we said so ourselves. for some reason we had been talking about dad's first son, christian. for some reason i thought he had a heart deffect. but no, dad said it was his esophagus i forget now, but it was attached weirdly and he had to be fed through tubes. i'll have to ask again to get the facts straight. i wish there was a picture of him. it's strange to think i have a sixth brother that i'll meet one day. we continued to talk about family things on the way home and we brought it right with us into the mobile home of mom's dreams. we started talking about dad's childhood and grampa and his evil temper and the beatings dad got and gramma getting hit too and dad making his peace with grampa after he died and so on. it was good to talk somehow even though we were talking about hard things, like dad being beaten black and blue when he was only 7 because his ear infection made him deaf to grampa. it hurt to think about that, but i could have talked about family things for a long long time. we also talked about our ancestors and how long we've been in canada on each side. and gramma's family and how her older brother len joined the church and influenced the rest of the family. i wish i had a built in recorder in my body. evan and i talked about that on the way home. we need to record these things.