Come Together

James/Anderson '10 was this past weekend and went over with flying colors. This family reunion consist of my dad, his sister, and the kids and grand kids. The yearly gathering used to always be at Thousand Hills State Park, but lately we've branched out a bit. Last year we hit St. Louis, the year before was Tan-Tar-a, and this year found us back at Lake of the Ozarks. Instead of the usual hotel or cabin renting we opted for a house....a really big house. This place was great, and allowed us all (20 total) to be within close reach. (kinda the whole point of getting together.

Let's face it. You can not get together with family and not eat...so we always eat good. Saturday was "bring your own meat" night and Dave was nice enough to cook it all up for us. After downing a Texas size t-bone and chasing it Sunday morning with biscuits and gravy, I'm pretty sure I need a few weeks of close dieting.

Shopping....ho hum. This house was about a mile from an outlet mall. My brother-in-law and I did find a knife store to keep us occupied for a few minutes. We thought it a bit odd to have tactical military knives right across the isle from Precious Moments dolls so.... we took a picture.

I'm pretty sure the kids had a blast. The property had it's own covered dock equipped with a couple kayaks and a paddle boat. This is a picture of Macy on her maiden voyage. She did rather well considering she's never paddled anything in her life. She only yelled "daddy come save me" once.

And when the four foot and under crowd got tired of playing in the lake, they could go to the side yard and jump in the pool. (a polar bear would have got chills in that water)

Great food, fun, and family. Not a bad way to spend the weekend. The coming week has us looking forward to a carnival. Tomorrow is the opening of bow season. (woo hoo!) And I'm trying to put together a "four states in one day" bike ride for October. So goods things are yet to come.