Memorial Day Weekend

We began our memorial day weekend on Saturday with lots of hard work. I joined Michael, Kasey and Rodney in helping the Gilbert brothers (conveniently minus the brothers) Mom and step-Dad move. We then worked hard around the house. Cathie and Em cleaned out the flower beds (even though her doctor expressly forbid her for doing it until her back felt better), planted flowers and put mulch down while Nate mowed the lawn and I did a bunch of odd jobs, including cleaning up dog poop, trimming my shrubs (I find it makes the house look bigger) and a bunch of other things to get ready for our party on Sunday.

We had a boat load of people here. Every year we add a few more people until the circle grows to what you see above. I'm not sure what the theme was, but it included Corona, some salsa lots of wieners, which my brother Dan has always been great at handling, though these were much, much larger than what he was used to.

The weather was a perfect and the kids broke out the squirt guns and water balloons, including Bender, who never put the gun down. He ran around and squirted just about everyone. My niece Allie renounced Uncle Jon as her favorite Uncle and replaced me into that position, as you can see from the picture below. We've gone from having one kid (Lindsey Thompson) to having about 25 at the event. The kids all played great and tired themselves out between the tire swing, the neighbors trampoline and running around dodging the water attacks.

Monaca got fed up with the whole squirting thing at one point, filled the squirt gun with lemon juice and repeatedly tried to squirt Bender in the eyes. Not really.

It happened to be Justin's 40th birthday and he wore his new backpack chair the entire time to symbolize his oldness. We sang happy birthday at random times to Justin, who just smiled and revelled in the fact that he had a chair on his back.

The party started around 1 and kept going until 11pm as we hung out by the fire with the Schultz's and the Eaton-Browns.

We spent Monday doing a whole lot of nothing except recharging. Cathie and the girls chilled outside. Nate and I went for a ten mile bike ride and then I fell asleep in the sun and did the human lobster deal with my butt-white skin. Nate and I caught the movie Prince Caspian, which we both liked - just not as much as Iron Man.

You can see the rest of the pictures from the weekend here.