A Family Reunion

This year my parents were very generous to treat the whole family to a family reunion. We met in Star Valley, Wyoming on Saturday, August 1st. That night we had a "All in one Birthday" celebration. Since we're all scattered here and there and we don't get to celebrate our birthday's together anymore, this was our celebration. The Parental's drew names for the kids and the grand kids a few weeks before, and then we were all to buy a book for whomever we got. It was a fun idea. Then our parents gave us all matching T-shirts with the numeral order of when we came into the family. Dad was 1, mom-2, I'm the second oldest so I was 4, Ryan-9, Luke-12, and Olivia-18. All together there are 21 of us now. Sunday, we left for church to start out our trip, unfortunately with 21 people and 2 bathrooms, we came close, but it proved to be an impossible task (especially when the estimated time to get there was given as 5 minutes, and it took 12). So we left from there to Yellowstone Park. It was so amazingly beautiful, the Teton mountains and the broad expanse. Oh, I felt like I was back in heaven. Below our family is posing for a shot at the Old Faithful lodge.

Olivia is trying to share some candy with Luke while we wait for Old Faithful.

Of course words and pictures can never describe how amazing Old Faithful truly is.

This is how we traveled with this many people and kids. We had my parents pickup with 5 people in it, my parents car with 4 people in it, then a 15 passenger van with 11 people in it. Bet you wish you were in the van too, huh? Really, it wasn't that bad. The kids did great trapped in there, there were very few fights, and those were stopped quickly by separating siblings.

One activity we stopped to do was skip rocks. That's always been something fun our family loves to do. So at a reunion a skipping rocks contest is a given. Too bad the little biting flies invited themselves to the party. We were just looking for rocks, and then came the "everybody run and keep your mouths closed" warning. There were swarms of flies. But a storm blew up and blew the flies away, the wind also blew over some trees where we were parked, so we did run back and got out of there as quickly as we could.

How do you pass the time when your in the car all day? Give Olivia a camera and she'll get some great shots for you.

After we got checked in to our cabins in Yellowstone Park, we went to visit the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. Of course when the kids see rocks they have to start climbing.

While Ryan and I were posing for this shot, Luke and Olivia went ahead with the others. When we caught up, Shanie, my sister-in-law told me that we were very lucky to still have Luke. In her words he tried to hurdle the rock barrier between the path and the canyon. They don't call it the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone for naught- it is an extremely steep deep canyon. Had he gone over the waist high barrier, it would have been disastrous. Luke claims he was "just jumping on the rocks." Seriously? Did the high altitude wipe out some brain cells? He still doesn't get that he was in danger by doing that.

A shot of my parents. Brad and Marie.