Here are the rest of the portraits from Thursday. I had a plan to take so many more, but the cooperation of the younglings did not allow it.

Malcolm’s little “Kingston” the horse was helping me set up the studio

But I guess I didn’t have permission because he was snatched away

So I had to use an owl

Brendan the cutie

Brothers!

Trevor wasn’t thrilled to get more pictures taken, this is the best one I could get

Friday we left the rental house and drove to Carlsbad to visit the caverns. I had hoped that Black Friday would be a good day to go, but was I wrong. It was packed. The first thing we learned as we arrived in the cave 750ft underground is that they had run out of food in the little cafe after the first 30 minutes of being open. We were hungry but decided to do the tour first anyway.

Can you see Trevor? This place is huge

The sign says “Mirror Lake” upside down because you were supposed to read it upside down in the reflection

Brendan asked me to take this picture because it looked like an eye.

I wasn’t really able to play photographer in this cave. The boys liked it, but the walk got long. Bill had to carry Brendan quite a long part of it. Shannon had to carry Malcolm while Jon chased down fast walking Kieran.

When we got out of the cave and back to the visitor center, we learned the restaurant was out of food too. We drove down to the main highway and the cafe there was having service and food problems too. We ended up having a very late lunch at McDonalds.

We stayed at a hotel in Carlsbad Friday night. We picked this one because of Brendan’s all time favorite hotel amenity- an indoor pool!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am thankful for this time spent with some family, and the great feast we had today with the army of small people. I hope everyone made some good memories today!

Brendan was waiting for his chance to eat a turkey leg

Dinner came out awesome, even cooking in a strange old kitchen

Since everything was closed today, we took advantage of the time and set up a little portrait session.

Malcolm was much more cooperative than we all expected

Kieran is very photogenic!

And a couple of outtakes!

I did take pictures of my own family, but I will have to post them on the next post!

For Thanksgiving this year we decided to “meet half way” with Jon, Shannon, Kieran, and Malcolm. That put us in the middle of New Mexico so we both drove to Alamogordo and got in late Tuesday night. We had four spastic boys running and squealing around the house for a couple of hours!

Wednesday morning, we started with a walk down the block for some breakfast. The boys eached walked a “pet” on a string.

After breakfast, we went to the White Sands Missile Museum.

The cousin crew is ready to play in the sand.

And they are off…

I can’t caption every picture but they sledded down that hill so many times, right up until the sun went down and the moon came out.

There were so many cute pictures today! I had to update now or I would get so much farther behind!