Fiamially (fee-am-yu-lly)

The title comes from the way I used to pronounce the word "family" when I was a small girl. Haha, over the years my family has pretty much developed its own vocabulary as we picked up and held on to funny ways of saying things or little kids' mistaken pronunciations...anyways, my whole family plus Harrison's girlfriend were here in Washington this past weekend! It was a great time of passing Georgie around, laughing, fellowship and a little sight-seeing.

The first time all of us were together was on Saturday morning when we gathered for a kind of smorgasbord (Matt had to help me spell that one...though he claims I still didn't type a real word because I left out the two little dots over the second "o") breakfast. We laughed a ton as Harrison and Vichka presented their gifts to Georgie: 1) a coffee machine, because, of course, babies are always falling asleep all the time, so Georgie just needs a good strong cup of coffee and 2) a monsterish puppet. I think Heather has a pic of the monstrosity on her blog.

We eventually mosied over to the Steilacoom Deli & Pub for lunch. Yummy just like the first time.

On our way home we stopped at the lake for a walk. Here are some pics:

Couldn't resist the shot of the butts as they all bent over to look at something in the water:
Since when did trees become food?
When we got home from our outing, we all decided that our skin temperature relative to the temperature of the pool water made ideal conditions for a dip, and Harrison became a hippie on our walk to the pool:
Georgie had her first dip in a swimming pool, poor girl hated it even more than she hates baths. But doesn't she look cute?

After having to say good-bye to my mom and Hunter, the rest of us went to church the next morning! Georgie got dressed up for her first occasion of hearing Jesus talked about in big words, as Matt said.
After church we went to lunch at a really cool restaurant ("we" here means the church group minus my dad, we had to say good-bye to him mid-morning :( ). It was a pizza place, called The Rock, and the theme was rock-n-roll. Guys, I love restaurants like this, that pay as much attention to atmosphere as they do to food. It totally reminded me of Hard Rock Cafe, except maybe a little more Disneyland-ish (i.e., EVERYTHING was part of the decorations, even the drink station where the waitresses prepared our drinks looked like dumpsters, and the outside of the menus were famous rock-n-roll records). I think I was the only one who appreciated the atmosphere so enthusiastically, but I think we all agreed on the caliber of the food. Oh, so tasty.

Pics:

This one was meant to be a picture of the two girls' scrunchy hair (thanks to my mom who labored to braid our hair the night before!!), but Harrison couldn't pass up the opportunity to take another picture with his beautiful girlfriend:
Part of the decoration in the restaurant, a guitar chandelier:
I was WAY impressed with the bathrooms. The minute you walked in you felt like a rock queen. The stalls were jet black with hot pink flames, the toilets were black, the walls were a juicy red, man, I could totally be a rocker. (Ok, probably not.)
After lunch we spent the afternoon at Dashpoint State Park. This was the first time that I got to wade in Pugent Sound! The water was very warm, and strewn all over the sand and in the water were beautiful sand dollars, some of them still alive! I started getting all excited and shaking them next to my ear as I marveled aloud at the little shell angels that we would find inside a sand dollar if we broke one of them open. Finally several of us gathered in a little huddle as Matt held a sand dollar in the middle of us and broke it open with his hand. Nope, no angels, but Matt did succeed in splattering my arm and face with mudd. The rest of the group had never heard of angels being inside sand dollars, so they proceeded to laugh at my belief and attributed it to one of my crazy dreams. I then became slightly frantic because of how CLEAR the REALITY of angels in sand dollars had been in my mind, so I crawled all over the sand, shaking many sand dollars to find the sound of loose shell and becoming increasingly uncomfortable with my world as I shook and shook but heard nothing. At that moment the reality of angels in sand dollars seemed to be the crux of everything I believed, I had to find them!!!!! Oh, those minutes were painful as I slowly began to believe that I had, in fact, dreamt up the notion of shell-angels residing in sand dollars.

This is me with the mud, also looking slightly perplexed because of my angel dilemma:
I managed to still have fun and shoot a few pictures:
The moment of truth!!!! I finally examined a previously broken sand dollar, one that looked as if it had been carelessy stepped on, and I found what I had so long and frantically been searching for!!!! Sand dollar angels! (Or, some people like to think they are doves...doesn't matter, it was what I was looking for!)
Georgie just looked so cute with her dad:


Do you see the jellyfish?
I want to frame this:
As our group was walking along the shore, Harrison wondered out loud what it would be like to climb this hill and find a tiger at the top:
The purpose of our walk on the shore was to reach those houses in the background, which from far away looked just like miniature playhouses:


Mr. Crab (um, Mr. Dead Crab, that is):
Perhaps the coolest jellyfish I've ever seen:
Have you ever felt the top of a jellyfish? All I can say is, whoever named them jellyfishes has obviously felt the top of a jellyfish. So fun to feel! Just steer clear of the tenticles!