Having a great time with my family! We left on Tuesday morning and after driving for a really long time we arrived. Had dinner with Grandma and Grandpa D. Tuesday evening, and got to see Owen for the first time in two years. It was great! Dinner was simple: hot dogs, baked beans, chips, salads. The visiting was what was most fun - hearing some of Owen's mission stories, catching up with parents, siblings, grandparents.
We spent the next couple of days just hanging out and enjoying being with family! That's what I like about my family, we don't have to be constantly out and doing things when we're together. It's enough to sit around at home and just be together. Takes a lot of pressure out of visiting, in my opinion. :-)
Anyway, this weekend is the family reunion on my mom's side. Our family was responsible for lunch today. Mom and I did all the shopping for it yesterday, and apparently shopping and cooking for approximately 80 people of varying ages and appetites is no small matter! The shopping took all day long. We visited the different stores to collect price information for everything we needed, which took a couple hours. Then we took a break and wandered around a couple thrift stores to get our energy back up. :-) I bought a really cute vintage maternity pattern, and am looking forward to getting fabric to make a dress. I also found newborn diapers for a good price (at a thrift store! how cool is that?) and some new Church shoes for Zaylee.
Then it was back to business; we went back to all the stores we had previously visited and actually bought all the food, getting each item at the place wherever it was cheapest. We completely filled the van with all the stuff we ended up buying!
Today was the first day of the reunion. Again, in our family there isn't much in the way of super planned activities and such. There were a few things - decorating T-shirts, sewing children's clothes for a humanitarian service project, little things like that, but mostly just visiting. I had brought my sewing machine, and enjoyed sewing together little pants and shirts. Grandma L. has an antique treadle sewing machine that still works - it's the machine she used when she was growing up. She graciously let me take pictures of her using it, then suggested I give it a try as well. So I got to use the treadle machine and it was lots of fun! It definitely runs more slowly than an electric, and takes a bit of practice to get your rhythm going, but I got pretty good at it and made a cute pair of pants with it.
Zaylee and Thomas have been great today. Grandma and Grandpa L. have a play area in their living room that has been popular with the kids ever since my mom was a kid there. Zaylee and Thomas spent a lot of time there today, playing with toys that have been in that old toybox ever since my mom and her siblings were young. There's even a little toy tractor that has my mom's name etched into it! So neat. Anyway, the kids had a great time playing with the other little cousins and getting to know all this family they never knew they had. :-)
I have of course been taking a few pictures, though not nearly as many as I should have! I don't think I'll bother with uploading them from the camera for now though, too much work. That will be a later post I suppose.
Hmm, I really did mean for this to be just a short, quick post to let everyone just know that I'm alive. Well, I guess it turned out a bit longer. That's okay though, right? :-) I'll do more later, but for now I'm pretty tired, and I need to put my feet up - they're swelling like crazy! I don't remember them swelling this early with my other pregnancies...
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