Family Reunion 2010 - Thursday and Friday

This year marks the Golden Anniversary of my parents, Jay and Margaret.  They met when they were both at BYU and my mom needed a ride to Heber, my Dad's hometown, to see her Grandmother.  The rides continued, and eventually they got married and started a wonderful life together.  In honor of this occasion we decided to have a family reunion, camp out at their house, and have one heckuva party!  Here they are, a way back when...

The official start of the reunion was Thursday evening, but the pre-party started that morning with a long and adventurous 4-wheeler and motorcycle ride.  I took the boys out of school on the 4th day of the school year to go...good mom/bad mom?  I don't know, but if you click on the picture and search for Jeffrey in the middle of that top left corner picture, I think you'll agree that he's pretty happy!  My sister-in-law took a couple of spills on her 4-wheeler and we are SO glad she was all right, and that the purple bruise that grew and grew didn't hinder her hardly at all the rest of the week.

Thursday evening we had a hot dog roast and set up tents all over the yard.  I scored my old bedroom and the girls stayed with us.  Jeffrey had a tent all to himself as the rest of the boys slept out under the stars.  Friday morning found us at Hyrum Dam lazing around in the shade if you were old, playing on the rocks if you were young, and if you were in the middle somewhere you were out on a kayak or a canoe or a fishing boat, all provided by Uncle Steve.  I especially love the sleepy pictures in the bottom right corner...

When we returned home from the dam thing, we headed to our old elementary school to have a little tour.  They have torn down the old part and taken out the teeter-totters, merry-go-round, and super slide, but it still felt quite a bit the same when we walked in.  My brother saw his 4th grade teacher and had a nice mini-reunion of his own.  We headed to the playgound after and enjoyed watching the kids play and even taking a turn on the swings ourselves.  And you know what, I LOVE to swing!  And I'm good at it, and some of us even got married!   After that we went to the building that used to house a little corner market where I spent many, many beautiful hours living in the candy aisle.

As if that wasn't enough...later that afternoon we loaded all of our bikes into the back of the truck just like we used to do when we were kids, only there weren't QUITE that many bikes...and we drove up to the mouth of Prov canyon and rode home.  I went with my sister and two of our kids the 'easy' way, and the rest went down Eck hill, which makes my stomach drop just looking at it!  Jane got to go down that in a trailer and she screamed the whole way, but in a roller-coaster type of scream, not the I'm-scared-to-death kind.  I can't tell you how fun it was to have bikes there...the kids went on a ton of rides!

For dinner we had this.  Please, wipe that drool from your chin.  It was as good as it looks, and the peach cobbler was quite tasty but I didn't get a picture of it.  I was too busy scarfing it down!  We had grandma time after dinner;

My mom has so many talents and she had this fun activity for us to do...we painted journals and she showed us how to do it.  As you can see, some of us are a little more artistic than others.  I used a pattern (mines the daisy without any other writing) but I think that is just fine!  I wish I had gotten pictures of some of the other journals...they were absolutely amazing!