Family Reunion

We have been and come home again, seems like several times recently!! We had a family reunion in Colorado Springs over the July 4th weekend. It was great fun and attended pretty well. I think there were 25 of us, 5 being children that played together and one baby. We had an absolute blast. It was wonderful being together, meeting all the children and some of the spouses. It had been a really long time so well over due. We went down on thurs and got in around 9, saw a few family before bed and then up for the zoo on Friday. The kids really enjoyed the zoo, well actually so did all of the adults I believe. Brayden and Caden are about the same age, Caden is a little older, they ran through a lot of the zoo together. Ran being an operative word there, cuz they really did run. I tried to keep up with them and actually didn't do tooo bad. It was a big day though. We got back to the hotel around 3 and Brayden was a bit tooo keyed up to crash, but he finally did. He got about an hour and then we had to leave for a chuckwagon dinner at the Flying W ranch. The dinner was good, entertainment was wonderful, and then some went to see the city fireworks and us parents with little ones went back to the hotel pool and swam by moonlight. The kids loved that, we could see fireworks from the pool sometimes so we didn't miss out entirely. Those of you who know Brayden know that fireworks are still plenty scary. Actually anything really loud is scary. Late to bed again on friday night, but we were just spending saturday morning in the pool anyway. We are fortunate to have a swim instructor in our family. Parents of little ones learned a lot about how to teach our children to swim, then some of us got instructions on swimming or treading water ourselves. We finally dug ourselves out of the pool around 1:30, had pizza, short nap and then off to the ranch rodeo. That was a lot of fun too. We had to root for three different teams at least and were pleased that they all placed in the top four if I remember correctly. I just know for sure that our favorite (family) team made second place. Two cousins on that team, so that was really fun. After the rodeo we did what I always said I wouldn't...we went out to dinner at 10 p.m. with 3 toddler children!!!!! It was ok, we had a balloon maker so that helped a lot. Another late night, common among Smith family members!! We had a real special sunday morning mtg, just a few of us and then hit the road. Brayden slept for about 3 hrs on the way home, that was one tired little boy. I really expected him to take a couple of long naps that week, but that didn't happen!! Here are some pics to show you the fun!!