GIA graduation

At the beginning of the month my family all met up in California for my sister Caitlin's graduation from the Gemological Institute of America in Carlsbad. She is now a real live certified jeweler and has two sets of letters after her name. We are all impressed that she has turned her love of all things sparkly into a viable career.

Oh and when I said my family met up in California I was literally referring to almost all of my fun mixed-up family together at the same time. Here is a picture of "The Clan" (listed from the bottom left and moving up and around the table) when we went out to lunch. We have: My sister Shoshana, her boyfriend Casey, my mom, my mom's mom, my dad's current wife Kathy, my dad, My dad's second wife's mom Joanie, Family friend's the Jimenez (Joyce, Ron, Steven, and Nicki), my sister Emily, My sister Caitlin and her boyfriend Tom, myself and Bella. The Blue Prince is taking the picture and missing is my dad's second wife Ishi, who unfortunately had to go home the day before to support my littlest sister in taking her SATs. Needless to say it was quite a group. The term herding cats comes to mind but everyone got along well and it was fantastic to see everyone.


As you can tell from the picture, Bella is the only small person in the family so needless to say she got lots of love and attention. She held up well under all the adoration but by the end seemed to get a bit clingy with mom and dad. It is tough work being so overly loved all the time.

We stayed in Carlsbad and decided to spend Saturday afternoon on the beach. It was somewhat chilly and so we all decided to walk and wade a little bit on the beach instead of swimming.


Of course Bella didn't quite grasp the whole wading instead of swimming part and ended up more that a little soaked. The waves were quite rough so she wasn't the only one. All of us ended up with wetter than expected pant legs.


Bella had fun playing with Papi being lifted out of the way of the incoming water.


Shoshana and Casey decided to bury my husband in the sand, reminiscent of the sand necktie episode of Mythbusters. They didn't make it much farther that this, but it is a good view of what he would look like as a dwarf.



Caitlin and her boyfriend Tom were being all shmoopy and cute on the beach (and everywhere else). We liked to tease them about inadvertently matching. (I mean seriously, from the brown pants all the way up to the red hair). It was the first time that Tom met "The Clan" and bless his heart he had the initiation by fire of meeting us all at once. Well I guess we can't say that he got to meet everyone. The Big Brother and his Russian Bride were not present which probably made things a little easier as he likes to play his big brother protector role to the hilt on the few occasions he gets the chance. It's hard work having 5 younger sisters.

I didn't notice when I took this picture of the cute couples starring off into the sea, that Emily was sitting in the middle of them playing in the sand. Unfortunately I made the mistake of mentioning the juxtaposition of it to her, leading to a comment of "gee thanks, I didn't feel like a third wheel till you pointed it out". Emily understandably got a bit tired of all the coupledom by the end of the trip.
Always in search of a good family picture, this is the closest we got on this trip. Which is kind of sad considering the blurriness and scowl on Bella's face. All in all it was a lovely trip and a nice break from the cold Autumn weather in these parts.