Baby Blessing, Birthdays and a Wild Camping Trip

We ended the official reunion on Sunday afternoon with the beautiful baby blessing of our sweet Dean Haslam Eyre. Look at what a clean, clear spirit he has!

And a gorgeous mother who takes such great care of him!

And a dad who adores him and his terrific mom so much…

And a big sister who is still getting used to Dean taking over as the baby of the family. She kills us with the way she wears her moods on her face and with her pizzazy personality!

All these brothers were thrilled to be part of an incredible Father’s blessing:

And these kids couldn’t be happier to have a new cousin!

We always has two birthday while we’re together in July. One is our sensational son Eli. Julie always comes up with something clever to celebrate. The kids were especially excited about this one because as you can guess….they couldn’t wait to bash these piñatas open and scramble for the candy!

This year Isaac turned 14 and his mother, as always, made sure we had a full day of fun activities to celebrate. It’s especially nice to be with all his cousins each passing year!  We’re proud of this terrific young man!

Two of our sons work for a company called Imagine Learning and luckily they hold their semi-annual conference the week following the reunion. So Noah and Eli go to work (along with several of the other dads)  while the rest of us stay and play. Shawni has some amazing shots of our fun together during that week here.

I also get to do my Grammie Camps that week which I’ll document next.

At the end of that week this year, Noah and Eli picked up Josh in SL in Noah’s fun Sprinter and came back to the lake where they were joined by Tal, Eli and Dad as well as our cousin Ben and they took the boys that were available and drove about 10 hours to Oregon where our family built a lot cabin about 30 years ago.

That’s another story but suffice it to say that it was so fun for the older guys to remember the fun time we had building that cabin two different summers when our oldest kids were teenagers and the youngest was Eli was two when we started. The cabin is about to fall over after all those heavy winters and and has become a magnificent palace for the groundhogs. They still reside there and anyone who visits the cabin just bring tents and sleeping bags and sleep in the magnificent forest of the Blue Mountains.

It is a wonderland for kids and the big guys had a fabulous time remembering our adventure all those years ago and building another tree house. Tal and crew built the first one last year. This year they created slack lines for the kids to play on. Sadly, I don’t have many pictures but here is what I have:

 

I’m happy to have this documented. Pictures bring back so many precious memories!