Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Cousin Camp


Eight cousins: Emma, Alex, Grace, Cole, Austin, Max, Joey and Blake

The girls playing Princess Monopoly, Emma was very popular with the "younger crowd"


Photo ham


The three guys on the left were unseparable. Max and Blake are cousin-twins. I wish they lived right next door.


Breakfast of choice for the kids.



We had a wonderful trip to Port Aransas last week. We were there for nine days. At the middle of the week, when everyone was there, we had 8 kiddos and 8 adults. But there were always people coming and going, field trips to Corpus, fishing, beach and pool.

David and I have an "older" set of kids. My brother has three boys and Julie has a girl and boy, and each of them has a little kid. I really like watching them chase after their youngests while David and I relax (somewhat). Things do get a little easier as the kids get older. Of course, I'll be the first with three teenagers.....

One day was really memorable for me. Mom and Dad and I were sitting on the beach, and we looked out to see that the clouds over the ocean had a little "tail". It was the beginning of a funnel cloud. We watched it get longer and bigger. Pretty soon everyone on the beach was snapping photos, and NOBODY was acting scared except the lifeguards, who were watching on binoculars and making phone calls. It petered out before coming ashore (or even too close), but it looked very cool.

Earlier that same day, David and I had been out boogie boarding, and the man fishing right beside us, pulled out a shark! It was probably 20 inches long, a mini version of a great white --the way I saw it. (Dad said it was a sand shark) The fisherman let it loose in the shallow water and we watched it circle around for a few minutes, with its little Jaws fin sticking up out of the water. Then David was romping back into the surf like nothing happened. All I could think of was that the little shark could still take a quarter cup of my leg with a bite.

Now that we are all to our respective houses. I'm trying to will everyone to move to Austin so that we can put our kids in the same schools and live on the same block. It's nice feeling that way after so much together time last week, but we have a few more golden years until 2017 when all eight are teenagers, then we can split to separate cities again.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like the "cousin-twin" comment - a perfect description of Max and Blake.