Some pictures from last weekend.

On Saturday, we drove down to St Pete to see the Monet in London exhibition. The exhibition was excellent, and St Pete is so beautiful - all that water and sky.

Here's the marina.



Of course, my kids can't be next to water that could potentially be fallen into without experimenting with balance.

We walked along the beach at Fort de Soto afterwards. It was windy and chilly and beautiful.



The beach there is one of my favourite Florida places; a wonderful antidote to the ugliness of some of central Florida's urban sprawl.

Bird in the waves
Boat through grass
Windswept girls in a tree
Crazed boy running randomly with hoodie over head
Me doing what I do best

Sunday, after church (where everyone sat still for a bit) we went for another walk at a local preserve.

Boy in a tree over water
Girl in a tree over water
Dangling girl, no water
Grandfather, evidently part of the same gene pool

This time with my parents is going so horribly fast. Hopefully we will see them again in the summer, though.

On which note, a couple of days ago I discovered, to my chagrin, that Sophie's passport has expired, and the other two kids have only six months left on theirs. So yesterday was devoted to getting all the bits and pieces together for a renewal. Forms, notarised copies of their birth certificates, endorsed photos, bank cheque for the fees ... I can't believe how long the whole thing took. And nothing went smoothly. For instance, at the very moment when I needed to print out the forms, the printer ran out of ink (yet another example of my stellar household management, I suppose). The photo place took way longer than they said they would. The first notary refused to do our birth certificates : she didn't realise that, while US certificates can't be notarised by an ordinary notary, foreign ones can, so I had to trail my way across town to another notary ... Still, at least it's done now and everything is winging its way to the embassy in DC. Although apparently the turn-around time for passport renewals is a whole four months, so we'll probably end up needing emergency passports anyway.