An older image of Angelina with Zahara and Pax
This week’s Life & Style has an article titled “Brad and Angelina try to be normal” which is all about their semi-settled life in a suburb of Austin, Texas while Brad films Tree of Life. They say that Angelina and Brad are fitting in well with the community and that Angelina drops off Pax and Zahara to daycare at 8am and picks them up again at 3:30. Six year-old Maddox attends the Lycee Francais School, which is another branch of the bilingual school he attended in both Prague and New York. Little Shiloh stays with her mom while her brothers and sister are off during the day:

The duo, who are living near Austin, Texas, while Brad films… “are just like the rest of us,” Leslie, a parent at Bright Horizons Day Care Center – where Pax, 4, and Zahara, 3, spend their days – tells Life & Style. “They drop the kids off, work, then pick them up.” In fact, Angie, 32, personally brings Pax and Zahara to daycare at 8 a.m. before taking Maddox, 6, to the Lycee Francais School (if Brad’s already on set [and unable to do it]).

While the older kids are out, Angie (who’s more than five months pregnant) runs errands and spends time with Shiloh, 22 months. But she makes sure she and Brad are back to pick up the kids at 3:30 p.m.

The two are clearly trying to give their kids a down-to-earth upbringing. But with security guards posted in the daycare parking lot, private flights out of the Smithville-Crawford Municipal airport and a top-security ranch in Cedar Lake, Texas, to call home, life is far too chaotic to be seen as normal. “There’s a lot of fuss and security now that Brad Pitt is making a movie here,” Kathy Moree, a 7-Eleven clerk in Smithville, Texas, tells Life & Style.

[From Life & Style, print edition, March 31, 2008]

I don’t know how families with many children manage, but they do somehow. It also seems unfair to point to Brad and Angelina as somehow uprooting the kids when they are trying their best to be there for them and to create routines and a semblance of normal life. They move around because they have to be in different cities for work.

It’s hard to keep things stable and the same for kids and I only have one son and things seem to constantly change with my family. We just moved to a new city about three months ago, we’re trying to get our house set up, and the daycare and babysitter situation is hard to manage. My son is three and he definitely feels the change. I just do the best that I can.

Life & Style points out that the Brangelina family were in New Orleans from March 13 to 17 so that Brad could break ground for the Make it Right charity with President Clinton. They’re now back in Texas. It’s looking more like Angelina might give birth in the lone star state. She still hasn’t confirmed her pregnancy, but there’s really no need to at this point.