I totaled the family vehicle back in November 2011, and since then, we have been using the public transportation. It is interesting how we are exploring the San Francisco Bay Area entirely from metro buses and subway. We are seeing a side of the area that we otherwise would not have seen if we were to drive our own vehicle.

There lived a pair of sisters, named Izabelia and Lucrezia, and they discovered, much to their delight, something . . . thus goes the story I tell myself in the head every time I see my daughters.

It’s a rare to find both the hurricanes sleeping together in their own bed instead of with us in our bed. Every morning, if they were still sleeping in their bed, I would find toys, books, sippy cups, crumbs of food here and there, and everything in between all over their bed, under and above the sheets. We practice family bed, ever since Izabelia was born, and that $300 brand-new four-poster crib has gone largely unused and is occupying a space in my mind about converting it into a four-poster 3-sided bench, and making it reinforced to support the growing weight of our girls as they grow up. I can dream, can’t I? It will be a possibility one day after we are done with our DIY projects with other furniture.

The girls loved nothing more than going for a walkabout in the neighborhood. They get to meet the dogs and the cats, exchange the pleasantries with people outside in their yards or on the sidewalks. They get to see a little slice of the world right here in this corner of San Francisco Bay Area that we are coming to call a home.

Over a year ago, Izabelia was on such a craze cutting her hair four times in such a short time that it left me very fearful to show her a pair of scissors. So I struck a deal with her: I will cut her bangs if she’ll not look for scissors to cut either her hair or her little sister’s. She agreed. Her word is golden. That I must believe.

I’ve never dreamt that I’d actually end up living here in the lovely San Francisco Bay Area, and actually get to see the Chinese New Year Parade right here in San Francisco. I’ve grown up, thinking, “Someday . . . Someday, I’ll get to go and see it.” Well, that someday happened yesterday, and I’m so glad I have my family with me to enjoy the parade together.

This is just a preview of our home movie.

Easter 2009 at my parents’ house, Izabelia wore my old Easter dress from when I was her age (or a bit older). Mom saved my Easter dress all those years, and I wanted to photograph my sweet Belia wearing my dress. Easter 2011, I tried to find that same Easter dress so that Lucrezia would wear it, but my mom had packed it away and forgot where she had put the dress. I was heartbroken because I really wanted both girls to be photographed in the dress since my mom never photographed me growing up. She was not big on taking pictures of us, not like my Dad. Even then, Dad only take out his camera during big events.

Moments like this are so important to me. I wish there are vintage films of me growing up like many of my friends have, and even my husband has some of his, even though his uncle has possession of them which meant I may never see them. I do not know what I looked like when I was a child. Many people have often remarked that I never look the same in the photographs, as if somehow my vitality has been gone, frozen because I was always on the move, always animated, my face making thousands of looks that could not exactly be affixed to silver nitrate backing.

A Looking Back post is exactly this – I want to memorialize my daughters, a video clip, a photograph, a drawing. Photography, whether motion or still, is priceless. I do not have wedding photographs of my parents, since they eloped across Arkansas-Oklahoma border. There are very few childhood photographs of my mother. The rarity of photographs, especially from my mother’s side, is what begat the obsession of photographing everything mundane and extraordinary.

Do you think about this, feeling as if photography is important to you, the images of your family, you, your childhood, everything that is happening around you . . . do you feel that drive to immortalize these moments?

Lucrezia loves nothing more than to make Izabelia’s creation go down!!!

Adding to their ever-growing hat collection, the plastic bowl, the skull cap, and their aviator hat (steampunk glasses optional).

I did not want to post so many personal images of my family and friends as well as any other personal projects that I am working on over at the WEDDINGS + PORTRAITS blog.  I may occasionally hang up a few personal posts there, but for the majority of stuff, you will find them over here on this blog.

Tim and the little hurricanes are my life, and I welcome you to step back and just enjoy the images, and, once in a while, some words.  I’m keeping the majority of my written works over on the Tumblr, so please do check that one out once in a while if you have any hankering to either admire the written form or laugh inwardly at my attempts at writing.

So enjoy the pictures straight from the House of the Kuyrkendalls!!!

Here’s Lucrezia taking a bath – she raises such a terrible stink about getting into the bath, but once she’s in there, she’s mellow and enjoying the shampoo massage, so I gotta grab a picture of her without the tears, for once!