Family Reunion

It's that time of year again!  The Anderson Family Reunion is an indispensable part of summer, and we wouldn't think of missing it.  As usual, we set a time for when we would depart, and left about 4 hours after that.  Luckily we still got there in time for dinner, so it's all good.  Some years we get there after everyone has gone to bed, so we did pretty well this year.  One of the things we had to do before we left was go to the dentist for checkups, and I was really worried that it would take all day.  But we go to an awesome dentist, and they did all four kids at once, so we got out of there in no time! (I split my kids into two groups for checkups.  Seven checkups in one day is just too many.)

On the way to the reunion, I realized that I had forgotten my camera!  Grrrrr.....
So all I had was my phone, and I didn't use it much.  So apologies for the lack of pictures.  You'll just have to use your imagination.

One of the activities that Melica had planned was Zentangles.  It is really just organized doodling, but it's a lot of fun, and fairly addictive.  You start with a square piece of paper and draw a dot in each corner.  With those dots you create a frame for your Zentangle. Then you draw the "string," which is just a random line that wanders into each of the four quarters of your paper.  This has some zen significance, but I can't remember what it is.  Then you add what lines you'd like to break it up into sections, and fill in each section with a design.  It can be as elaborate or as simple as you would like.  Here are the Zentangles that I made and brought home.  They're kind of fun, huh?


There was a playground right by our campsite, a creek running past, and lots of cousins to play with, so the kids had lots to do and didn't really hang around me too much.  The only times I really saw Annie were when she needed to change her clothes again.  The poor girl is terrified of loud sounds, so any toilet that has a flush louder than a home toilet is not an option unless I'm there to flush it after she leaves.  I'm afraid this resulted in several accidents during the reunion.  That, combined with the creek, meant that she was wearing her pajamas on the way home because they were the only dry clothes she had left.

Cannon brought his stilts with him, and walked all over the campground.  He ran into a problem, though, when he tried to show off and made them so high that he couldn't get on them without a really high something to step off of.  All his cousins had fun trying them, and Cannon had fun being the best at it.

The very best part, though, was when the kids did their musical number.  We have the same number of kids as the VonTrapp family in the The Sound of Music, and they are even in the same order and everything!  So we have wanted to do this musical number for several years, but we have been waiting for Annie to be able to sing her part.  This year she is finally big enough, so we got it ready for the reunion.  The kids did an awesome job, and had so much fun.