The Fam

This is us! Well, most of us anyway. Cath's kids are missing, Jim and his family are missing, Danny and his family are missing, and I'm sure there are others missing! We have all come from 6 siblings, who have all passed away now. I think they would have been proud of all of us.

This picture is my grandpa and great uncle's families. They were identical twins and extremely close. They played great jokes on each other and were, I believe, the best of friends.
And here is my wonderful family! My cousin Annette is so much fun...I wish we could spend more time together (Hi Annette!!) My mom's brother is in the white shirt (Uncle Dave) and mom's sister is right in front of him in the black and yellow (Cathy) She is only 7 years older than me so I never, ever called her Aunt Cathy. OK, I did when she was a teenager and hated being old enough to be an aunt!

There are so many more pictures but Blogger doesn't like to do more than a few at a time so there will be more to come!

What a Weekend!

We met up with a total of 94 family members in Burlington this weekend for our Family Reunion. I will post some pictures of that separately, and not all of them because already there are more than 300 and only 2 of us have shared what we took!

On Saturday afternoon Mike, Mark, Jeff, Tammy and Craig went to see the Jays lose to the Yankees. They were way up high in the nosebleeds and they had a great time. After the game kids were able to run around the bases so Mark thought that was cool.

Jade and I had our own extra special fun on Saturday afternoon. It turns out that my good friend Debbie lives only minutes away from Burlington. Knowing that I had the perfect opportunity to spend some quality time with her I ditched the ball game and headed to her house instead. Her 2 boys are the sweetest little guys. Jade brought some gifts for the boys which was a great icebreaker because they spent at least a half an hour trying to get the toys out of the packaging! While they were doing that Deb took me on a tour of their brand new beautiful house. It was like walking through a magazine. They have decorated and designed the most gorgeous home.

• Jade, Matthew and Nathan waiting for bubbles to come out of the Bubble Machine.

The new house has a heated (bonus) pool which we had a blast in. See Jade without water wings!!! She's swimming now and so to heck with them....

Nathan likes to jump off the stairs into Deb's arms. He and I did this for quite a while. He's a hoot!! (Ha ha Deb...I had to throw that in somewhere!!)

We had a wonderful bbq lunch complete with a delicious cheesecake for dessert! Thanks for that!! YUM!

Deb and I have been friends since I was 8 and she was 7 (Jade's age). We are connected to each other in a very special way considering we never grew up in the same town, never went to the same schools and never had the same friends. We have years worth of precious memories collected from short, but always fun visits from the past 33 years. I love her to pieces and miss her terribly when we are apart. She has a loving husband and 2 wonderful boys. I'm very proud of her.

I love you Debbie! My sister by choice!

XOXOXO