Family Reunion

This year was my family's first attempt at a "Family Reunion." Even though we live close, we still get so busy with our separate lives. Kelly, my younger sister took the reigns in putting together our little getaway and we had a great time! She found a cabin in Idaho near Lava Hot Springs to stay in. We left on a Thursday night and came home Saturday afternoon. She put a lot of work into it! The first night we set up our sleeping areas and discovered the only drawback to the whole experience.....the cabin was infested with mice! Eeek! We could hear them scamper across the floors and jump into garbage cans all night. It totally grossed me out! I pretty much didn't sleep that night!

Friday we spent all day at the Lava Hot Springs pool area. They had a group of 3 different swimming areas. The first one, we spent most of the day at and it was a large Olympic size pool with water slides and diving platforms as well as high diving boards. Jared went straight for those slides and the high dive! By the end of the day, we'd all been pretty cooked by the sun, but it didn't stop us from heading over to the actual Hot Springs area. It was in a garden area and the coolest one was 105 degrees! It was supposed to have a sort of holistic feel about it, but with our kids running around, we probably put a damper on the atmosphere for others.....oops! I was burned enough that I didn't get in the water - the heat wasn't doing anything for me!



We went back to the cabin for dinner and then set up a movie screen we rented to watch an outdoor movie and have a talent show. We were all supposed to have come with a "talent" to share. I had an idea, last minute, to put together a slide show for my parents of all of us girls growing up. So I literally spent every free minute leading up to heading up to the cabin, making that slide show and it turned out wonderful! Because I spent all that time on the slide show I didn't get a chance to come up with anything for our little family to perform and then I had a thought......my kids love to dance to the song "I Like To Move IT, Move It" from the Madagascar soundtrack. So, basically our talent was us standing in front of everything shaking our "groove thang" for everyone. The kids had fun! And everyone was, of course, laughing! At the end of the talent show, we showed our slide show and it did its job - Mom and Dad were in tears. I'm glad they liked it so much! After the talent show, we sat around a fire to roast marshmallows and watch the movie. That's when our accident happened.....(see next entry).

Saturday morning, after breakfast, and some clean up, we had a water balloon toss and played some volleyball. Kelly's hubby Kirt helped the kids build bottle rockets out of 2 Liter bottles and we saved them and launched them on Pioneer Day a couple weeks later (the 24th of July). Then, as we drove out to a cave out in the middle of a bunch of wheat fields that was underground and explored the front of it. We didn't go too far into it - not a great idea with little people and one flashlight! It was a lot of fun! Thank you Kelly and Kirt for all your planning! We had a great time!