Celebration time

First of all, I'd just like to give everyone a moment to catch their breath.  Isn't my little sister absolutely stunning?  Aside from her radiant beauty, there are two things that I really really love about this photo:
1) she chose to wear my mother's wedding dress and 2) her extremely talented husband took the photo.  That just makes this so special to me.

Even if she doesn't always look like that.

So you know how you have certain friends who are awesome all-around friends, but they're also your specific go-to person for certain things?  Like I have running friends, and gardening friends, and parenting friends--you know, things like that.  Things that you just always talk about because you're both interested in them.



































It's the same way with my sisters--Elise happens to be my sister where I am crazy and laughing all the time.  For instance, we spent probably two hours one night taking horrible Photobooth pictures of ourselves and laughing so hard my stomach started hurting.  And then we took really awesome videos of ourselves trying to feed a cookie to the screen and texted them to my sister Mary Beth.  (And Elise is the only other person I know who actually likes playing Quelf--I vividly remember one game where we were rolling around the floor because our arms & legs were frozen, we had signs taped to our foreheads, and anytime someone rolled the dice we had to yell "Quelf in the land of the farm!"  We thought it was hysterically funny and everyone else thought it was stupid.)

Anyway, I was thrilled that Elise was coming out for an open house in Michigan the month after her wedding (since she decided to leave on her honeymoon after her wedding instead of hanging out with me.  What's up with that?).  So thrilled, in fact, that when she asked me if I could come earlier and stay later I packed up my FIVE CHILDREN in an hour and half (!!!!!!) and drove by myself so that I could spend an extra couple of days with her, rather than leaving later in the week with Neil as we'd planned (he drove up separately a few days later).

One of my favorite parts of the openhouse was watching my grandfather hold his namesake--Nathan's middle name, Edward, is for my grandfather.

And, of course, there were mass quantities of food left over afterwards and Paxton and Neil manfully did their duty by eating all the barbequed pulled pork they could hold.

Um...and that's it!  I didn't take any pictures of all the fun times where we were just hanging out relaxing and playing games and eating.  I love spending time with my family so much--they are the best!  And I was so happy that Neil could come up for a couple of days--he was there for my birthday and it was wonderful.  And the rest of the photos from that weekend (from my camera, as opposed to the iPad) are here.