A royal flagging!

A friend at work managed to smuggle home this flag for me from a visit to London.

I could hardly keep from ripping it open, I was so excited. Waving it around the newsroom might not have been the most professional behavior, but I say who cares? We are talking about THE Royal Wedding after all.

More Monterey...

Dad and 2/3 of the Huffman Girls.

A rare photo of mom (who is usually behind the camera)

Go fly a kite, dad.

The girls at one of our favorite beaches, Marina State Beach, Marina, Ca.
All smiles... for now.

Monterey 2011

On our first stop of the Annabelle College Tour 2011 we headed to Monterey for a weekend. Other than the girls fighting like crazy, it was a fun trip.

Technical difficulties posting pics tonight! Will upload more tomorrow....

Quick as a bunny

Surrendering to Motherhood

Jennifer Huffman

The other day when I got home from work, our youngest daughter gave me her good news.

“We’re getting bunnies!” she said excitedly.

Really, I said.

Bunnies as in Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail? Where did this idea come from?

Dad said I could, she said. I’m going to raise them and then show them at the Napa Fair.

Really, I said.

It’s true that my husband grew up on a ranch with pigs, horses, chickens and probably a rabbit or two. He used to show his animals at fairs all over California during the summer and paid for college using the money from his pigs.

But we live in the city. I’ve already got my hands full with a full-time job, Girl Scouts, track, cheerleading practice, teaching a teenager how to drive and attempting a load of laundry now and then. I don’t have time to take on bunnies.

Not to mention that there are already five of us, a dog, plus two turtles and two goldfish in a 1,700-square-foot house.

Where exactly are these bunnies going to live?, I asked him.

The backyard, he said. A few days later two brand-new rabbit cages appeared at our house. My husband cleared a spot on a bench where he set up a little rabbit duplex.

This is the meat pen and this is the pet pen, he said, pointing at each cage.

The what?

Well, you get four rabbits but you only keep one as a pet, he explained. You sell the other three to a butcher after the fair.

Butcher?

I looked at my daughter, wondering how she was taking the news of the bunny executions. She shrugged like it was no big deal.

At least I get to keep one, she said.

There was just one little problem. We needed to find the bunnies first.

My husband got on the phone and started making calls to bunny farmers, who mostly seemed to be named Jessica and Ashley.

Not only did we have to figure out whether to buy the bunnies from Jessica or Ashley, we had to figure out when to buy the bunnies. Apparently, rabbits need to be within a certain age range for the fair — not too old, not too young.

How do the judges know how old a bunny is, I wondered. What do they ask for, bunny ID?

Turns out that finding baby bunnies this time of year is harder than you think. A lot of the top breeder bunnies have been preordered, my husband told me.

This only made him more determined to get his hands on those rabbits.

I’ve got a lead on a good breeder, he said. She lives in Fort Bragg.

Fort Bragg? We’re going all the way to Fort Bragg for a bunny?

My husband quizzed the breeders about ages and weaning. One rabbit farmer suggested we buy four or even five “meat pen” bunnies, so we could then pick the best three to sell. Another breeder sympathetic to our timeline said her bunnies would be too young to wean, so she would send us the baby bunnies and mommy bunny, which we would return after the fair.

Great, we’ve gone from raising four bunnies to five or six bunnies and now a rabbit rental? At this rate we’d need more than two cages, we’d need a full-on bunny barn.

And there was more bunny news. Apparently when you take your rabbit to the fair, you don’t just set up your cage and wait for the ribbons to magically appear.

She has to decorate her bunny cages, my husband said. It’s a showmanship thing.

I should have known. I’ve seen the handmade signs and ribbons and flowers decorating the pig and sheep barns at the fair.

I started making a mental inventory of ribbon, fabric and trims. Should the cage coordinate with the color of the bunny? What are the bunny décor trends this season? Is there a Martha Stewart of the bunny-decorating set I should consult for inspiration?

It’s a good thing the fair isn’t until August. Our girl was going to be busy with these bunnies. She better hop to it.

Ursuline Girls forever...

Today my mom and I headed over to Santa Rosa to Ursuline High School to celebrate 130 years of our school, but to also say goodbye.
The school has closed, which means the class of 2011 will be the last to graduate as Ursuline Girls.

We met friends Kathy, Cherie and Paige at the picnic tables; our old lunchtime hangout.

Later we gave ourselves a tour inside the school.

My mom worked at UHS for 12 years, so we also visited some of her old classrooms.

Grandma Sue checks out the old Chemistry lab.

The library. Another favorite hangout for me, especially freshman and sophomore years...

The quad...
I was hoping to get a pic by my old locker, but no luck, the doors were locked.

The school may be closed, but the saying is still true:
Once an Ursuline Girl always an Ursuline Girl!

Grad party 2011

Allie's graduation celebration continued with a family party in our backyard.

You know how you never really clean up the backyard until you're about to have a bunch of people come over?

Don worked for weeks getting the yard ready, planting new flowers and sweeping all the gunk that the cork oak leaves on the patio.

Way to go Dad!

8th grade grad!

Allie graduated from 8th grade this week. Now our second girl is off to high school. Not sure how I feel about being the parent of two teenage high school students. Girls no less. Yikes.
These are pics from the wonderful lunch for our graduates.

And here are some pics with Allie and her older, reluctant sister.

Sugarloaf Park

Last weekend we headed to Sugarloaf State Park for a walk...
The girls did pretty good.

Annabelle, the runner, was in the best shape and beat all of us to the top of the hill.

We stopped at this bridge to take some photos.



then the girls got sick of posing...

I really hope they don't have to close all of our state parks.

Momarazzi

Apparently my children think they are way too cool to let Mom take their picture at breakfast on Sunday.
What do they think I am -- momarazzi?