Since they were both up and wide awake, Erin offered to help Laura make breakfast for the others. It was so nice, Laura thought, working in the kitchen with her daughter, almost like nothing had changed since Christmas. But, she told herself, stealing a sideways look at Erin as she stood mixing a big bowl of pancake batter with the electric whisk, she must not forget that Erin was not Samantha. While she may have taken her place, she was her own, unique person and must be treated as such. Still, there was no harm in enjoying the same activities with her new daughter that she had always enjoyed with her first!

“About time!” Laura teased as Josh came downstairs in his dressing gown and pyjama bottoms just as breakfast was about ready to serve, all laid out on the table like in the movies. “I thought we were going to have to eat this all ourselves!”

“That’s quite a spread!” Josh whistled, looking at the pancakes, waffles, yoghurt, fruit, bacon, sausages, hash browns and scrambled eggs set out on the table. “We expecting another thirty people over?”

“Maybe we did get a little carried away!” his wife admitted. “But we’re going to be out all day and eating out for so many of us can get expensive, especially with the other party coming up, so it makes sense to start the day as full as we can be!”

“Can’t argue with you there!” Josh chuckled, pouring himself a coffee and sitting down at the table. “Where’s the rest of the kids?” He looked suspiciously at the bacon and sausages on the table. “Hope you didn’t get too carried away! You know Willow would have you strung up!”

“No, no!” Laura assured him with a chuckle. “That’s just plain old pig-parts from the supermarket! At least, I assume it’s pig! You can never be too sure these days I suppose. You didn’t check on them before you came down?”

“It was so late,” he replied a little sheepishly, “I figured you’d all be up already and waiting for me.” Laura shook her head in amusement and patted him teasingly on the top of his head. She was just about to say that she would go wake them when they all heard the shower turn on upstairs.

“Well, someone’s up!” Erin observed, looking towards the stairs.

“Wait…” Laura chuckled. “You didn’t leave your poor brother alone with those two, did you? They’ll end up having him for breakfast, never mind all this!” She gestured at the table. “You’d better go check he’s okay and get everyone to hurry down. Don’t want this going cold, after all!”

Giggling, Erin scurried off, back up the stairs while Laura covered the hot food over with foil to keep it warm and poured out glasses of orange juice for everyone. Up in the bathroom, Erin found Ryan in the shower with both girls but fortunately, this time, the main focus seemed to be on getting each other clean. Although his respectable boyhood was hard, the skin on it looked red and slightly swollen, as did the plump lips of both girls’ fillets, and nobody seemed to be too interested in touching or being touched in these areas.

“Room for a little one?” Erin asked, slipping her robe off and opening the glass door of the shower cubicle which, having been designed for one, was quite the tight squeeze for the four of them but they got freshened up quickly, especially once Erin told them about the lavish breakfast awaiting them downstairs.

Less then ten minutes later, the three girls were sat at the table with Josh and Laura, naked and with damp hair but at least properly washed, dried and dusted with talcum powder, joined a few minutes after by Ryan who had insisted on ducking back into the bedroom to get dressed first.

Talk over breakfast was mostly about the upcoming party but, as they all happily stuffed their faces, Josh turned the conversation around to the options for the day’s outing which he had narrowed down to the zoo, a castle with several interactive experiences built in as well as the historical building, or a couple of the big museums in town. All the possibilities had their appeal but eventually they all agreed on the castle and Laura sent the girls and her husband upstairs to get dressed while her new son, who was already in suitable clothing for the day, helped her clear up the breakfast things and load the dish washer. Finally it was Laura’s turn for a quick shower and to get dressed which she did while Josh and the children put together a bag of snacks and drinks for in the car.

The outing was a great success and by the time the Martins dropped Ella and Lydia back home to their mum that evening, everyone was tired but happy. At their own request, Ryan and Erin slept in their parents’ bed with them that night, wearing their matching Christmas pyjamas. Since the previous night had not been the most restful for either of them and the day’s activities had been very energetic, both children were out cold almost as soon as their heads hit the pillows, nestled together in the middle of the big bed like the Babes in the Wood. Snuggling either side of them, Josh cuddling Erin and Laura cuddling Ryan, the couple considered how blessed they were to have not only had the privileged of raising the most wonderful, big-hearted and not to mention delicious daughter they could have wished for in Samantha but also to now have these two sweet siblings to share their lives and hearts with.


Part Two – Happy New Year


New Year’s Eve arrived and Laura remembered the pictures that had been taken at Christmas with all the girls at the party lined up so that their bare behinds could be used to spell out “HAPPY NEW YEAR”, with little Rosie standing face-front at the end to provide the exclamation mark. Knowing that it was going to be a late night, she had left her husband and the children, sharing their own bed for now until the room that had been Samantha’s could get renovated to their tastes ahead of the more extensive remodelling project she had in mind for the whole upstairs, sleeping while she came downstairs to get on with her little editing project.

After making herself a coffee and switching on her computer, she trawled through all the photographs from Christmas Day and the following morning which had been taken by various members of the family at different times during the day but all on the one camera. Other guests had taken their own pictures, of course, and she had been sent some of them which she kept in a separate album but this was the contents of her own SD card that she intended to sort through in the New Year and put together an album celebrating Samantha’s last Christmas. It seemed to surreal to think that it had only been a week ago. So much seemed to have happened in that time, it felt like months since Christmas, the decorations still up in the living room providing the only reminder of how recent it really was.

She found the pictures she was looking for and flicked between them, looking for the one that had come out best. It seemed funny, thinking back, how reluctant her niece Nadine had been to join in and how hard the other girls had worked to persuade her to take her clothes off, if only temporarily. The nine year old had, in fact, not wanted to come to the party at all when she had first seen the invitation, fearing that she would also end up on the menu. Over the course of the day she had apparently had such a change of heart about the whole matter that apparently, on the way home, she had asked her parents if she could be next year’s turkey! Of course Christmas was still a very long way away, especially for someone her age, and she could easily change her mind, which was something the Laura would not judge her for at all, knowing how easy it was to get caught up in the excitement and vibe of the moment, especially with Lydia and Ella bragging about how they were getting eaten soon too, the same with Amelia, and the pretty teen Rachel who had been quite open about considering being roasted to celebrate her own Sweet Sixteen. Still, Laura had not been able to keep from giggling when her brother in law had told her about the conversation on the way home from the party.

She had intended just to use one of the photos and was looking through them to pick the best but, seeing how many there were and how well they had come out, she decided to do something a little different and stack three pictures on top of each other with captions. She hoped as she carefully cropped the chosen images and adjusted them to the same size, hoping that Rosie wouldn’t mind being cropped out of the first two.

Deciding on the picture she wanted to add the letting to, she carefully mapped the golden letters on, one per cheek, morphing them slightly so they really did look as if they were painted on the girls’ shapely rumps, then drew the tapered stick of the exclamation mark down Rosie’s tummy and put the dot over her cute, chubby little fillet, using the painted-on effect again, of course, to preserve the shape of her sweet, plump lips and slit.

On the top was a picture of the girls standing up, backs to the camera, of course, with their arms around each other’s shoulders and looking to the left. At the top of this one, in which, brush-stroke front text, she wrote “As we look back on 2034…” On the picture below, where the girls were in the same basic pose, she wrote “...and forward to 2035…” Then finally, at the top of the final picture, she added the words, “The Martin Family would like to wish you…” Then, of course, the decorated rumps of the girls, a picture where they were all bending forward and holding onto the spit, leaving very little at all to the imagination, spelled out the final message.

Grinning to herself, Laura saved the composite image as a single file and made a bulk email with the addresses of everyone who had been at the party. It was cheeky, certainly, reminding her of the seaside postcards she had giggled over when she was little, but she was sure everyone would find it either amusing or exciting, or perhaps a mixture of both! The picture of all the girls looking to the left with little Rosie facing front on the end was actually a really nice picture and she resolved to look for a suitable panoramic frame she could display it in if she printed it out.

They would be going to Amelia’s grandmother’s for the evening and to see in the new year but that was not until seven o’clock so they had the whole day ahead of them yet. Although she did not mind, she was the one to have encouraged the relationship in the first place after all, she had a strong feeling that Amelia would try to monopolise her husband’s attention at the party, treating him as her own plus-one. They were lovers, after all, with not only Laura’s blessing but her encouragement too. Amelia only had a few months left to live so was never going to have a real husband of her own and boys her own age or even slightly older would have no idea how to properly treat a young lady and love her like she deserved so, for the next few months at least, Laura was happy to share her husband with his little concubine and fully accepted that he would be her date for the party. Until then, however, he was her husband and father to their newly-adopted children and she wanted to make sure they enjoyed some nice, wholesome, family activity together before the evening.


To be continued...