Croquet, Harris-Smith party, Petaluma, California

I'm having a lot of trouble editing down the images I shot at our second (annual?) Harris-Smith get together which took place in March. First off, it was easy to decide to give Lennon a blog post of her own, because she is so ridiculously adorable and easy to photograph. Here is my second post from that day, and this one is all about: Croquet!

Here's handsome Devon gearing up for his version of extreme croquet. Since my parents' house ("Gopher Flats") only has yards that are, let's say, highly topographical, one must play a sort of off-roading version of the game.



Austin's also taking it seriously:






(Side note: you know what's cute? Since my (baby) brother fell in love with his awesome girlfriend Emily, his dress sense has gotten a thousand times snappier. At first she was helping him find these amazing thrift and new scores, and now he's figuring it out on his own. Instead of stealing my dad's ancient work shirts and too-big jeans, he has a little preppy, hipster look now. Aww! Oh! And I forgot to mention that Austin was a surprise guest for my mom's birthday portion of the party - she didn't know he was coming out from NYC, what a great treat!)

To be honest, I wasn't really in the mood to play croquet (mostly because I am TERRIBLE at it, and never want to play the game through), but when I saw that there were no women playing, I jumped in, with the stipulation that I could quit at any point. Sadly, even after cheating, I quit almost immediately into the game. The weird thing was that everyone lost! Someone (I forget who - Austin maybe? Dev?) became "poison" (meaning they were the first to reach the opposite post, and could now make any other player out by hitting their ball). Then Poison killed everyone, and on the final strike, accidentally went through a wicket, disqualifying himself! None of us had ever seen anything like that. (I still haven't, since by that point I REALLY wasn't paying attention, and playing with the baby instead)


I like to think that this means that I won!



Such menacing shadows!






Here's my dad trying to make the course a little more even... is this cheating? If you saw the amount of obstacles that the gophers present us with, you might not think so.






Brothers-in-law making flagrant misuse of official croquet equipment (don't try this at home):