Haldaman Family Portraits, 2011

When we go on vacation, we always try to get a picture of the whole family, having fun together (or at least pretending to). We managed to get a shoot in on Sunday night, before some of the boys had to go home for work.

You can see that we tried to match everybody within the "family groups" -- my youngest sister and her gang in white, my middle sister and her peeps in blue, my posse in green, and my parents in pink. Except my mom didn't have a pink shirt, so she's the outlier. Which is pretty much typical for her, anyway. (In a good way, always.)

We also did a semi-formal shoot on Thursday night with just my parents and the kids, everyone in white. It was a just a touch overcast and very humid that night, so the combination of the elements plus the lighting plus my general ineptitude made for slightly gauzy photos, but I like them. If I actually knew what I was doing, these pictures would have been amazing. (Also: not sure if you can tell, but my nephew is wearing a tiny little guayabera shirt with monkeys embroidered on it. ZOMG MONKEYS! Little boys' clothes are SO CUTE. Why oh why don't they make anything that cute in my size? Although I'd never rock it quite as hard as he does, the handsome little devil.)

I also got this picture of my parents on one of the balconies of the house, which is one of the best pictures that has been taken of my parents in the last 30-some-odd years. Are they not among the cutest parents ever? I hope my husband and I are that adorable after we've been married for almost 40 years.

Some other sub-family pictures that came out great. (I don't know where the nice photo of my little family is, but whatever, it isn't as lovely as these are, anyway.)

Totally gratuitous, but COME ON. Work it out, Miss Divalette! I miss when Shae was smaller and less attitudinal and she would sit still and pose for pictures for me. Experience leads me to suspect that Makayla won't do this for much longer, so we all took as many pictures of her as we could. Plus: hello, she's gorgeous. (I think this looks like a catalog picture. Baby sold separately.)

Caption for this one: Girls' Club, Class of 2011.

And all of the "biological" Haldamans, on the last day of vacation, which was also the nicest, weather-wise. Because of course it was.

Tomorrow: OUTTAKES! The silly photos are always the best. (A quick sample, via Instagram.)

I'm On A Boat

While we were on vacation we took advantage of a Groupon -- no, my capacity for cheapitude does not extend to vacations (in fact, I think there is NO BETTER TIME to be thrifty than when you are on vacation, if only to awe the world with your mad shipping ninja skills) -- and we all went for a whale watch. (OK, "marine mammal watch," technically.)

Yes: all of us. All eleven of us -- thirteen, if you count the camera and the contraband stroller as one person each, as I do -- drove an hour and a half south on the Garden State Parkway, each way, to take a three-hour boat tour. On an overcast, windy day, with a hurricane just over a week past, another tropical storm looming just off the coast, and three more weather situations brewing.

And it was AMAZING.

The kids loved being on the top deck of the ship, just hanging their heads and arms over the side of the railings, feeling the wind in their faces. We honestly could have driven around in a big circle for three hours and they wouldn't have cared.

But. BUT!

Dolphins. Tons of f'ing dolphins.

Now for all I know, these are the same four or five dolphins in every single picture, and I don't even care. (The captain said there were about 35 in total; I don't know.) They were RIGHT THERE. I could have leapt off the side of the boat and ridden on the back of one off into the sunset. (I didn't, but only because I was afraid would misjudge the jump and fatally rack myself on one of the lower decks, and of all the undignified ways that there are for me to get myself killed, "impaled on the oar of an emergency dinghy" is not really near the top of the list.)

(Also, if I got the camera wet on my way to a watery grave, my husband would never have forgiven me.)

Trying to maintain one's composure and act like a civilized human being when there are ZOMG REAL LIVE MOTHERTRUCKING DOLPHINS RIGHT OVER THERE SQUEE! is exhausting, yo. Plus I think I might possibly have gotten whiplash or something, because the water was REALLY rough -- we didn't see any whales because we couldn't get out as far as the boat normally goes because of all the storms and whatnot -- but at the time I didn't even notice because I was so busy checking "see live dolphins up close in the wild" off my bucket list.

See? Good times.

Children and Other Wildlife

So. We survived vacation. It rained and there were a lot of late nights and early mornings and entirely more bug bites that I ever thought were possible -- obviously, it's been a while since I went camping -- but we survived. Not just survived, but thrived, really, except for that one time when I got that killer pain in my neck-and-back, and a couple of stubbed toes, and a pedicure that didn't even last a week, and some rough surf, and someone drank all my Malibu (and it wasn't me), and possibly someone else consumed quite a lot more Oreos than might perhaps be considered seemly (and maybe it was me that time). Still. Isn't that why they call it a "vacation"?

We hung out by the (heated) (private) (in-ground) (wonderful) pool.

And we frolicked on the (gorgeous) (mostly private) (mostly deserted) (almost eerily quiet) beach.

And we dug around with heavy construction equipment on the dunes, which is generally considered off-limits, but not here.

AND THERE WERE DOLPHINS, which I will show you tomorrow. (For more pictures in the meantime, although sadly none of marine mammals, you can check out my Tumblr-slash-Instagram-photo-dump.)

All in all, I can't complain.

Book Review: "Slow Love" by Dominique Browning

I'm on vacation this week, and every spare moment has been spent in a book. What I've been reading between wine coolers is Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas, and Found Happiness by Dominique Browning, a memoir about the author at midlife, working through the abrupt changes that lead her out of her corporate office in Manhattan and into her pajamas in Rhode Island.

Much of the book is about the author's working through a long-term relationship with a legally-separated-but-not-divorced man, whom she eventually realizes is ambivalent about their romance. If you could even call it that; I don't think it's particularly romantic to spend more than a few months working things out with someone who repeatedly asked why it mattered that he remained married to his wife.

Ultimately, it felt to me like that relationship ambivalence bled into the pages of the book. It is beautifully written, almost lyrical, but behind the pretty words there is a strange lack of emotion. Every time I felt Brown had turned a corner and was getting to the point where she would finally find happiness, she reeled herself back and only seemed to find a grudging, almost unappreciated acceptance that I found frustratingly disappointing.

We'll be discussing Slow Love over at Blog Her Book Club this month -- if you're interested, why don't you join us? I'll be there as soon as I get back from vacation.

Grab Bag: Happy Birthday From The 2000 Phillies

This post is part of a sort of "blog hop" series that hope to contribute to semi-regularly -- The Grab Bag: Writing Prompts for Bogged-Down Bloggers. Of course, I don't normally have trouble coming up with something to write about as long as I have pictures, but when I don't ... well, that's the trouble. So I am really excited about having some kind of starting point, at least, for not-necessarily-kid-related blog posts, since I'm all out of pictures for the week (and anyway, I'm kind of getting tired of using them as a crutch {which of course I just originally typed as "crotch" because OF COURSE I DID, durr}). The "theme" for Week 1 is "Memorable Birthdays" (paraphrased, of course -- more details at the link). Feel free to join in, if you want; add a link to your post in the comments over on Dancing Lemur's blog, and then browse everyone else's contributions as they come aboard.

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We're not really birthday people in my family. I mean, we have birthdays, because everybody has birthdays, but we've never really been the sort to throw giant parties just because we could. We'd have family and a few friends over for cake and ice cream, and of course we got cards and gifts and flowers and special dinners and stuff, but birthdays have pretty much usually been low-key affairs.

When I graduated from college and got a full-time job, I started making a habit of taking a vacation day for my birthday. I mean really, who wants to get up at the ass-crack of dawn so they can go into a cube farm and forcibly socialize with people they don't like very much on their birthday, when they'd rather being doing literally anything else, including laundry? Not me.

The year I turned 26, my parents wanted to do something extra-special for my birthday, so they treated my husband and me to an afternoon Phillies game. The weather was gorgeous, as luckily it often is in this part of the country in early May, and that early in the baseball season, even the Vet was lovely. It was a businesspersons' special, an early afternoon game, so I basically got to spend the entire day with my three favorite people in the world (my husband and my parents, plus my sister and a couple of her friends from Princeton). My name appeared on the Phan-a-vision in giant letters, and I freaked out slightly because the entire City of Philadelphia saw how old I was, and I got a free cap, and an entire baseball stadium sang "Happy Birthday" to me and I got confetti thrown in my hair by total strangers.

It was, in a word, amazing.