Family Reunion

Here's all the kids except Oscar. L to R: Charlotte, Kirby, Lula, Leo and Willa

Both Lee's sisters and their husbands, some of their kids and grandkids, and some of our kids and grandkids, all descended on our house over Labor Day weekend!

Friday August 30th

Everyone arrived around 4 pm. Mark and Mary, Sam, Elsa and Charlotte.  I finally get to meet Charlotte! She is almost 2 years old. It’s so nice to see everyone. Mark and Mary haven’t been to Minnesota since before we built our house. Tomorrow Cathy and JA are coming up from Zumbrota and Sam and Danielle and their kids are coming from Duluth. And of course Sarah and Erik and the boys will be over too. We don’t have space for everyone to sleep at our house so Mark and Mary are sleeping in our RV, Cathy and JA are sleeping in THEIR RV, and Sam and Danielle and kids will be in a hotel in Chanhassen. Elsa, Sam and Charlotte will sleep upstairs. Lee made pasta jambalaya for dinner. It’s fun to just sit around and talk to everyone but I have a race in the morning so I go to bed early.

Saturday August 31 

The Triathlon is in a separate post. I get home from the race around 11 am and Cathy and JA show up right about the same time as I get home. Everyone else, including Sarah and the boys, went out on the boat. Cathy brings food wherever she goes so she has rice salad and smoked salmon. We have lots of things to snack on too. I tell them to make themselves at home while I take a shower. They hook up their RV, and we try to make sure it’s on a separate curcuit from our RV, but we still periodically trip a breaker throughout the weekend. In the afternoon Sam, Danielle, Lula, Willa and Oscar arrive. We seem to have a large number of bananas since everyone brought some with them so I make banana bread. Everyone comes over for dinner. There’s lots of eating, talking and laughing. Lee and his sisters and their husbands stay up talking, but I’m trashed and go to sleep.

Sunday Sept 1 

The banana bread was a hit and is soon gone so Mary makes more. Our kids take their kids over to the hotel to swim. We hang out, talk eat, dinner again. The little kids have so much fun playing together. Ages 6mo-2-3-two 4.5 yo and 6.5 yo Leo. Oscar is a challenging baby. He doesn’t sleep much and a pretty fussy. But he’ll grow out of this phase and probably end up being a sweetie. Lula is so precocious I keep thinking she is Leo’s age not Kirby’s. Willa is amazing. She is visually impaired but very determined and smart. And Charlotte was a doll! We’d heard that she was a challenging kid but we thought she was great, just two. Wait til she’s three!

Monday Sept 2. Everyone left in the morning. Charlotte didn’t want to leave, she had so much fun playing with all the big kids. So I told her that all the other kids had gone home and the only people that were staying were Uncle Lee and me. Then she was ready to go home too!

It was so much fun having everyone here, especially watching the kids play together. It reminded me of when I was little, playing with my cousins. I was the oldest of 13 cousins and some of them were much younger than me (the youngest was born when I was 20!) but there were two cousins on my mother’s side that were close in age to me and my sister and we played together a lot when we were small. Its a great memory and I’m happy that my grand kids will get to experience that sometimes too.