Weekend in the Woods

Every year my family gets together to hang out with each other.  It is the most anticipated vacation of the entire year (at least for my little family), hands down.  We love it!  We love playing with cousins and staying up late and talking and laughing and getting reacquainted with each other.  We normally do this for four or five days in Sunriver, but Disneyland is slated for next year, so we decided to do a family vacation on the cheap this year.  Welcome to my brother’s back yard.  We all pitched tents on their acreage and settled in for two days of fun, fun, fun.

The hottest attraction was a water bottle rocket contraption that my dad and brother made.  It began as this:

Air from a bike pump gets pushed into the pop bottle half-filled with water, you pull a cord, and yippee, a rocket shoots into the air.

(You can see the air being pumped into the bottle on this one.)

The kids all made a rocket and then the dads got involved.  The rockets started getting pretty elaborate after that.  Sean’s swirly ones were my favorite.

Eventually they upgraded to a foot pump, “cemented” down the launch pad, and moved the rip cord several yards away from the launch site (much safer).  Check out that jet stream.  ;>

All the little girls sat on the trampoline and screamed out the launch count-down.  They were awesome cheerleaders.

 

Love that baby!  I’ll also take a moment here to mention that on Friday night we celebrated Erik’s birthday with cake and ice cream, had a campfire and watched a movie on the side of the house.  Fun!

My brother also put together an “Amazing Race” for all the cousins to go on.

 

They got clues and zoomed around to all kinds of fun activities, like cannon building, golfing, and b-b gun shooting.

This is my very favorite picture of the weekend.  We are fortunate to live pretty close to one another, and yet a moment like the one above is very rare.  Between kids and spouses and general activities it is very unusual for the four of us to be together – like in the same room, in the same conversation – at the same time (sitting around the dinner table on Thanksgiving does not count).  I have so many wonderful memories of growing up with these people.  I can truly say that my favorite people in the whole world are my family.  Mom and Dad, you done taught us good.  I love every last one of you.

And I love my brother’s shirts – seriously – where do you find stuff like that?