Reunioning Austin Family Style

I must be taking crazy pills because I returned last week from a reunion with my Mom's family in which I flew alone with my two girls to Salt Lake (Joseph had to stay home to work, sadly), then rode in an RV with my entire family for an entire evening plus a day (and didn't get more than 5 hours of sleep) through Idaho, Oregon, and into Washington to hang out with some awesome people for a day and a half before returning along the same route again, all in about 5 days' time.  But I wouldn't have had it any other way.

We joined up with the Austin Family in some beautiful woods at Camp Zarahemla near Yakima, WA for our reunion this year.  I hadn't seen several of these people for a while, so it was very fun to introduce them to my kids and chat and play and have a wonderful time for a couple of days.  This is a picture we took with everyone in the family who came.  There sure are a lot of us now, "All because two people fell in love."

It was fun to be with all my siblings on the trip, and the girls sure love their aunts and uncles who take good care of them.

Grandpa Lamb drove the entire way and was even nice enough to occasionally let Sophie and Avery "drive" the motor home with him (shhhh, don't tell Dept. of Child Services on me!)

This camp area was gorgeous, woodsy and right next to a beautiful lake.  Being there with family helped remind me what's really most important in life: winning.  Just kidding!  (Though I will mention that our team did win the competition.  But who's keeping track? :D)  Of course I mean family and the gospel.  All the rest is so superfluous.

We were divided up into teams to participate in various competitions and I was lucky enough to be on the same team as one of my favorite people, Daryl, and his new fiance McCall.  She is great and I really like her a lot.  She rocked the cooking competition for our team, and Daryl held his own very nicely in the Name That TV Show and Name That Movie Quote quizzes.  The other quizzes we participated in were on spelling, geography & history, geneology, math, and a Name that Song quiz.  We also played Family Jeopardy and had to fill out sheets of all the members of the family's names, birth dates, and marriage dates.  Thanks to Aunt Kathryn's excellent memory we rocked that competition.

Mr. Sleepy comes to visit Abby a lot, and he came early this night since these guys got about as much sleep during the trip as I did.  (Nice face, Pete!)

My cousin Ben brought his fiance, Katie, to the reunion, and we heartily gave our stamp of approval.

One of our Austin reunion traditions has always been playing Mafia at night with all the cousins.  While I didn't quite get there this year, it was good to see the tradition still going strong among some of the younger cousins.

Here are Abe, Hannah, and Amanda plotting out their next Mafia lynching.  We also played Murder in the Dark one night which was great in the pitch black lodge we were in, and I think that more than a few of us are going to eventually need therapy for all the killing of cousins we do at these reunions.

Dave won't ever gang up on Andrea, the party pooper.  Come on, you're not even newlyweds anymore!

Amy, Brendan, and Jill are ruthless when it comes to getting even.  They look sweet, but believe me: ruthless.

Here are two of my most favorite people, my cousin Joe and his wife Deborah.  They live near Boise and I wish we saw them more often.  Thank goodness for blogs!  It was fun to catch up with them a bit and see their 5 (FIVE!) adorable children.  I didn't get a picture of two others of my favorites, Dave and Karen, but it was also great to see them (and stay up waaaaaay too late chatting at night with them) and their SIX kids.  All in like 8 years, too (and no multiples!)

Here are some of those adorable grandkids.  These are the great grandkids of my Grandpa and Grandma Austin, and there are only a few missing from this picture, so not bad.  They were all super cute and growing so fast!

These are my cousins who were in attendance.  Can you even see little ol' me squeezed into the middle of those tall pillars on the left?  Can you tell that height is our friend in the Austin family?  And good looks, too, of course. :)

This is where we all came from.  These are my Mom's siblings, minus Mark and Randy.  They were both greatly missed at this reunion.

My Mom's siblings and their spouses.

We played a lot of field games with our group competitions.  Here was the aftermath of the gummy worm feeding contest.  These are all the mama birds who had to dig with their mouths through bowls of whipped cream to get the gummy worms out and feed them to their 4 baby chicks.  Hilarious.

They had a bunch of competitions for the 10 and under crowd, and I think it's safe to say that Sophie has no clue what it means to compete.  She couldn't understand why so many other kids were trying to get her socks off her feet or safety pin off her back.

She especially didn't get the water balloon throwing.  Why would you take a perfectly good pink balloon and ruin it?  She opted to hand hers to another child to throw instead of doing it herself.

We were glad Sophie was around for the 4-legged races, though, because McCall and I just tied her ankles to our thighs, picked her up, and ran.  We barely beat out the team next to us for the win.

The last part of the competitions was a canoe race.  While the 5 canoes were out racing, the rest of us waited our turns to go, and for Avery that meant getting into the frigid lake water and splashing to her heart's content.  I couldn't believe her teeth never started chattering from the cold, but she seemed happy as can be.

The last event of the reunion was a variety show.  Sophie and Austin sang a couple of songs together, including a rousing rendition of "Row Row Row Your Boat" at the end.  It was very cute.

For my portion of the show I agreed to do a clogging number with Julie and Scott.  Julie choreographed part of it and then taught it to us.  That unfortunately meant that I had to learn it in the motor home on the way up, so I was less than prepared and stood there looking clueless for about 40% of it.  Scott and Julie did awesome, though.

Peter and Abby also did a clogging duet and my dad and brothers started the show off with a bang with a chin face lip sync number.  Speaking of lip syncs, one of my favorite acts of the night was this dude who waltzed into our show from off of the streets to sing "On the Road Again."  Yep, Willie Nelson a.k.a. Grandpa Austin graced us with a musical treat that was quite entertaining.

All in all we had a wonderful reunion and appreciate my Aunt Betsy so much for putting it all together.  I love being with my family and feel so blessed to come from such wonderful people.  Thanks to all who made it happen!  I love you!