PFR 2012 - Day 2

On Saturday morning (Day 2) of our reunion, we awoke to the aroma of breakfast. Lisa and Mack cooked and served up some homemade pancakes and bacon. It was super yummy!

Because it was the first time since forever that everyone was together, I made an appointment with a professional photographer to come take our family picture at the Reunion Home on Saturday mid-morning. Since it was Easter weekend, I had a really tough time finding a local photographer from the Rexburg area. Everyone I contacted was either out of town or doing a wedding. Out of approx. 15 requests for different photographers, only two said they could/would do it. One is well-known and was very, VERY expensive. The other one was a BYU-I student with a photography degree, who was a lot less expensive, but still had a high price tag. So, I went with the lesser one. He came out that morning and he and I walked around looking at different possibilities of sites, outdoor and inside. Then we gathered everyone and ventured out in the snow that had fallen the day before. It was cold, but the sky was clear, and he took a few shots of everyone, of grandkids, and of siblings.

After the half-hour photo session, everyone went back inside and did their own thing...lots of play time for the kids and lazy time for the adults! Except for Mick and Jen, who were on lunch duty, and began prep work for the best salad and fruit bar lunch ever!

We gathered together for lunch, and it was such a delicious and gorgeous treat! We ate so well at the reunion!

After lunch, the kids dyed and decorated hard-boiled eggs for Easter. My mom bought them all matching aprons so that the food coloring wouldn't stain their clothes. They looked so cute in them! They had fun coloring and embellishing the eggs. Each child chose their favorite egg they made to enter into a contest for judging and prizes.

The egg dyeing/embellishing took most of the afternoon, between applying colored layers and letting them dry, and decorating with markers, stickers, glue and accessories. While they waited for the eggs to dry, the kids just kept on playing; the 3 big rooms in the house complete with bikes a game tables and toys kept them entertained constantly! After the eggs were done, it was Cody and BreAnne's turn to make dinner. They made some yummy nachos with tons of toppings.

After another delicious meal was consumed, my dad went outside to hide all the plastic eggs for the annual Perkins Easter Egg Hunt. This has become a big tradition in my family to have the annual egg hunt every Easter. My dad hides the eggs, and my mom organizes the event and is in charge of prize money.

There's an adult egg hunt, and a kids egg hunt, done in different parts of the yard. Each egg hunt is done at a separate time, with everyone involved beginning on a start line. In the adult hunt, there are a gold and a silver egg that are hidden that are worth big bucks ($20 and $10) and that's the ones that everyone wants and goes crazy to find. In addition to that, each adult can find/pick up 12 regular eggs. Each of the eggs is numbered, and when the egg hunt is done, there's a paper that shows how much each of the numbered eggs is worth, ranging from 50 cents to $2. There's usually some mystery eggs that are worth $5, too. Then the egg tally sheets are added up, and returned to my mom, with the plastic eggs, for payment. The kids egg hunt is very similar, but on a cheaper and smaller scale: the kids are allowed to find a certain number of eggs each, there's a hidden gold egg worth $5, and mystery eggs worth $2, and regular eggs ranging from 10 cents to $1. Instead of the eggs being numbered, she has different styles of eggs that are hidden (animal-shaped eggs, sports ball eggs, silly face eggs, etc), so even the little ones can help separate and add up their tally sheets themselves. This was the first time we had our egg hunts somewhere other than my parents' front and back yards, so it was different trying to find places where the gold and silver eggs could be hidden!

My mom telling everyone the egg hunt instructions instructions before going outside.

(p.s. I LOVED the giant dining room in this house)

Jen & Tawna were the big winners of the adult egg hunt!

(p.s. Jen was 8 1/2 months pregnant, and this photo makes me smile every time I see it)

The kids on the starting line before their egg hunt.

Searching in their designated area for the gold egg...

Ammon found it! [again]

Back inside after the hunts, tallying the prize money.

After all the results were in, and all the prize money paid out, my mom got out cake decorating supplies for the kids to create their own edible designs on mini-cakes she'd baked in the shape of eggs before eating them for dessert.

And while the kids were doing that, some of the adults played a few rounds of "Qwirkle" with me (my new favorite game, remember?).

(this particular round was so competitive and challenging and high-scoring, I took a photo of it)

Then night time arrived, the kids went to sleep in the bunk room, and slowly everyone else went to bed as well. Jen and I, along with her two oldest daughters, and Tabbi took a nice, soothing soak in the outdoor Jacuzzi after dark. It really relaxed me; I love soaking in hot tubs. I fell asleep a lot easier that night because of it. The second day of the Perkins Reunion 2012, full of activities and eggs and fun, was a successful one!

PFR 2012 - Day 1

The Perkins Family Reunion 2012 was Friday, Saturday, and Sunday over Easter weekend. I decided to host this year, and through the help of my sister-in-law, I discovered a great Reunion Rental Home called Three Peaks in St. Anthony, Idaho. I talked to my mom about it last summer, and we researched it online and found out that during the off-season, it's a lot cheaper to rent. So, since we usually get together as a family for Easter, we decided to combine Easter with our annual family reunion and have it at the Reunion Home. The house was absolutely amazing! There were 9 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms, a dining room with 4 tables and seating for 40, a kitchen with a commercial-sized fridge and freezer and 2 stoves, a giant living room with a big fireplace, a game room, a gym from a converted 3-car garage, and a family room with a big TV. It was the first time we've ever ALL been together: all the siblings, spouses, and grandkids (at all of our previous 4 reunions, somebody was always missing).

The first day of the reunion, Friday, we all drove to the Reunion Home from different locations/directions. Lisa and Mack and their boys flew out from Virginia the week before and had been touring around Montana, so they came from the Northeast. We drove in from Salmon on the Northwest. And my parents and other brothers and sisters drove up from Utah on the south side. We began arriving around 3:00, and all got there in intervals until about 7:00.

I broke up the meals into assignments; each family unit picked which meal they wanted to serve, and they were in charge of choosing their menu, purchasing the food for it, cooking it, serving it, and cleaning it up. I signed up for Friday night's meal. I made Corn Chowder, and cooked Rhodes rolls to go with it. I made it all the morning before we left because I didn't want to have to bring all the ingredients and make it after we had arrived there. So I toted it down in ice cream buckets in coolers, and reheated it on the stove there. I made the rolls that morning as well. The dessert for my meal was the birthday cake that I made for my dad, whose birthday was that same day, and I baked the chocolate mini cupcakes after we arrived. I was glad I decided to make soup, because it stayed warm, and as people were arriving, they could eat a hot bowl of it.

After dinner, and after everyone arrived, we sang to my dad, and ate the dessert, and he opened a few presents. That evening was spent familiarizing ourselves with the new space: the kids played in all the different play-areas of the house, the families picked which bedroom they wanted, everyone unloaded food & luggage from their cars, and put things where they needed to go. There was lots of hugs, laughter, and conversing. We were so happy to be together in such a fun place!

The front of the house

Each room was decorated in a theme. This was our family's room:

This was the game room. There was a ping-pong table, air-hockey table, foozball table, another game table (I can't remember the name of it), and a seating area. Also, on one side of the room was a slide to go down to the bunk room underneath, and on the other side of the room was a monkey-ladder to climb back up from the bunk room.

This is the Bunk Room downstairs (right under the game room), with wall-to-wall built-in bunkbeds. It also included lots of soft-play building blocks, a few boxes of toys, and a bathroom, and of course the slide and monkey ladder.

This is the gym that was previously a garage. We loved this room! It was well-insulated, so the kids could make all the noise they wanted, but we couldn't hear it from inside. There was two entrances to the house from the gym: one upstairs by the kitchen that also included a slide back down into the gym, and an entrance into the family room downstairs. There were wall chalkboards, basketball backboards, bikes, trikes, and other activities to play in this room.

 This is the entrance to the house. It's a split-entry, so when you walk it, you can either go downstairs to the family room or upstairs to the game room.

(Downstairs)

(Upstairs)

This is the family room downstairs, it was the central location for all the bedrooms. There was a few couches, a chair, a bench, and the only TV in the house, where we played lots of wii.

 

And this is part of the giant living room upstairs. There was a nice, large sectional leather couch, a big fireplace, a piano, and a well-used pool table.

My boys loved the house as much as I did! The entire first night, they kept saying things like "This house is the BEST! We want to live here! This house is so much FUN!  Let's move here!". And since my parents and two sisters arrived before we did, and Aunt Tawna answered the door, Kanyon kept thinking that the house was hers. He kept saying "I love Aunt Tawna's new house!". The house made us all happy; it was such a great place to host our 2012 family reunion!

Cream Puffs + Mini Chocolate Cupcakes =

 my Dad's Birthday Cake!!!

My Dad's Birthday is on April 6, and this year it was the Friday of Easter Weekend. Our whole family was together for the Perkins Reunion that same weekend, so we all got to celebrate his birthday together as well. The Reunion began on Friday, and we were all travelling from different locations to the Reunion Rental Home in St. Anthony. I wanted to take a birthday cake that would travel easy, and not be destroyed on the drive. I bought a box of frozen Cream Puffs at Sam's Club a few weeks earlier, thinking that I would just lay them all out in a large pan, and place candles in some of the puffs to make the outlines of a 7 and a 1. But the day before we left for St. Anthony, I worried that the candles wouldn't stay upright in the puffs, and I didn't want the candles to destroy the yummy puffs, so I came up with an alternate idea. I needed something similar in size to the cream puffs to put the candles in, and it needed to be darker than the cream puffs so the numbers would stand out. I had some chocolate cake mix in the cupboard, so I packed it up with some mini-cupcake liners and the baking tin. After we arrived at the Reunion Home, I got to work baking chocolate mini cupcakes, and then placed some of them with the cream puffs in a giant cake pan. I was so happy with the result of my creative thinking! My dad isn't fond of cake, so he was happy with it, too!

The cream puffs were gone in a matter of minutes after he blew out the candles, and everyone snacked on all the extra chocolate mini-cupcakes during the remainder of the reunion, too.

It was the easiest birthday cake I've ever made!!!

Spring 2012 Top Ten

I usually put my Top Ten lists up at the beginning/end of every season. Obviously, I'm a little behind in posting this at the end of the Spring Season. My Summer Top Ten is already listed on the sidebar of this blog because Summer has arrived! These were the Top Ten things we looked forward to happening during Spring this year, and we completed all ten of them!

1. Spring Break!

We had a full week off from school at the end of March. We played with cousins, went to one of Jonah & Micah's wrestling matches, worked on the new rock walkway in the backyard, got caught up on ALL the laundry (first time in forever that the 6 dirty clothes baskets were all empty), and went camping and hiking.  

2. Celebrate Easter with the Perkins family.

I will be blogging about this in the near future...we had a family reunion at a Rental Home in St. Anthony and all my siblings and their families came. We had a wonderful time!

3. Going camping for the first time.

I love camping! We went over General Conference weekend. We usually go to Challis Hot Springs for our first camp experience every year, but this year we changed it up and stayed at a spot near Dug-Out Dick's Caves and hiked into the Gold Bug Hot Springs instead.  

4. Plant flowers in the backyard.

One of Josh and the boys' gifts to me on Mother's Day was purchasing flowers and then planting them for me in the backyard along side the house, on the terrace, and in the planter pots on the front side of the house. 

5. Watching Jonah & Micah wrestle.

This was their first year wrestling (and possibly their last, they weren't that impressed with it). We went to Darby Montana, Challis and Mud Lake Idaho to watch their wrestling meets. Unfortunately, they cancelled one of the meets in Salmon, and we were unable to attend their last meet which was also in Salmon because it was over Easter weekend when we were out of town.

6. Seeing Ammon run track.

This was his first year running track for the Junior High. As a 6th grader, they are only allowed to participate in the Friday track meets because they aren't excused from school to attend sporting events until 7th grade. There were only two Friday track meets, and we were only able to attend the one. He practiced every day after school, and for the most part he really enjoyed it. He did a fabulous job running the long distance events at the meet, and he thinks he wants to pursue the sport of Cross Country next year.  

7. Attend Kanyon's preschool program.

Kanyon has attended the CDC preschool for the past 3 years, and he has grown tremendously during that time. He loves his teachers and his friends that have attended there. His little preschool graduation program was so cute, and he was so happy and beaming.

8. Kala's teaching conference in Couer d'Alene.

In April, I attended the bi-annual Idaho Music Teacher's Conference for 3 nights/4 days and I learned so much! I was grateful for the opportunity to go. I will be blogging about this in the near future as well with more details.

9. Josh building a new walkway in the backyard.

It took us 4 days to complete the project as a family. Josh was the foreman, and the designer, and his project was an absolute success!

10. The last day of school!

The kids and I looked forward to this day for months. I began a countdown on a wall in my classroom beginning at "25 school days left til school is out for the summer". I couldn't wait! And when it finally came, it felt so surreal. But we are all loving summer so far, and I'm enjoying being home all day now!