Labor Day Weekend

Like last year, we had a great weekend hanging out with my dad’s side of the family at my parents’ ranch.  Have I mentioned before that we love spending time with family?  :)

The agenda for the weekend was the usual… eat, play games, chat, repeat.  My cousins that live in San Diego and Michigan made the trip and it was so great to have everyone together.  And by “together” I mean really, really together.  The ‘sleep your family of 8 in one room together’ kind of togetherness.  Luckily my parents built the ranch with these numbers in mind.  Although they usually have the master bedroom all to themselves while the rest of us get to listen to our loud, mouth-breathing brothers all night, so touché to them on that foresight.

I’m still working on getting more consistent at remembering to take pictures, but here are a few of the random ones that I did manage to snap.

Here is a series of pictures of my newest cousin, Laura.  She is absolutely precious, so I won’t even apologize for the fact that these pictures really have nothing to do with a Labor Day post other than the fact that I took them this weekend.

Laura has a bug-loving older brother, Jackson.  He’s pretty cute, too.  He will do just about anything to be the center of attention, hence the whole ‘eating a live cricket to see how everyone reacts’ thing.  I reacted by taking some pictures.

I couldn’t get Addi (the oldest of the blonde trifecta) to pose for a picture, but I talked her into letting me take a picture of a cricket on her arm and snuck her in, too. I used to babysit Addi several days a week back when she was a baby and we both lived in Waco.  She’s 5 now and in kindergarten.  Where does time go?!?

Back to the actual events of the weekend.  We played some whiffleball:

We played A LOT of One Bounce: My mom is moving so fast that she is a blur in this picture.  It’s a knee replacement success story.  Or a low-light photo situation.

We managed to lose a few balls to various roofs and/or trees, and then lost even more balls in an attempt to retrieve the first.

Kolby and the kids spent a lot of time shelling peanuts and making peanut butter:

Kolby taught us a grotesque science lesson about how female praying mantises bite the heads off of their mates while mating and then just let him decompose on their backs, and we got to see first hand that he was definitely not making it up:

And we helped my dad corral a cow that had jumped the electric fence and was wreaking poo havoc on our whiffleball field. 

I also took a stab at my first family photo shoot:    

That about wraps it up!  In case you’re interested, just a few minutes ago I heard a fire truck and then looked up from my computer to see that it was parked in front of our house.  Turns out someone reported that our backyard was on fire.  It wasn’t.  Which was good, because I’d feel like an idiot if I was sitting on the couch uploading pictures while our yard went up in flames behind me.