Category: Family

For Thanksgiving my family and I went up to my brother’s… in the middle of nowhere.

Okay… it’s not really nowhere, but he lives in a small Northern California town, population 368. One grocery store, one “farm and feed supply,” and the next town up (17 miles away) has a McDonalds!

My brother is a pastor in a small country church that brings out almost 200 people (from his and surrounding towns). It’s a fun town. Everyone waves to each other as you pass them on the roads. Most people farm or ranch. Good people.

For Thanksgiving day we go out to my cousins, who live in an even smaller town. They have a 900 acre ranch. 30 to 40 of us ate a Thanksgiving meal together. Then some cousins rode quads, others went on a walk on the property… I went skeet shooting with my son, my brother and a heap of cousins (then, just for fun, we decided to experiment and see what shooting a 12 gauge slug into a gallon jug of water would do. Wow! Very cool!)

At night we ate another meal together and everyone got out their guitars, banjos, violins, etc. My daughter Ashley has been learning guitar from my dad… they both played. My dad played banjo (no Deliverance jokes!), and my son played the uke. One of my cousins (my son’s age) is an amazing fiddler. We had quite the little band, half of which were 15 or under.

From my brother’s 8 month old daughter, to my 80-something grandma… fun for all. We sang worship songs, Christmas carols, even some really old bluegrass. It’s not necessarily my style of music, but it’s my style of family fun.

It doesn’t get much better than this.

Okay… on October 22nd I posted a blog with a picture of my two daughters (so dang cute). Basically, my wife Lori and I had gone running, and my girls rode their bikes with us. They rode back early (bored of watching Lori and I huffing and puffing) and began playing in the front yard (who says that junior high girls don’t still “play?”)

The result was a creative little checkers game they made from bark, leaves, etc.

I thought it was cute so I blogged about it and posted the pic. They thought that was “so cool!”

Sure enough, next time we went running they wanted to go back to the house early again… this time with a new enthusiasm. When Lori and I got home, they had constructed a clever little billiards game.

(they used twigs as sticks and some weird acorns as pool balls)

Now they keep trying to come up with new things. Two days ago they created a Twister game.

(look at their little “spinner” they made with a twig in the upper right of the pic. And notice they didn’t have colors for the dots, so they used a variation of twirls, squiggles, stripes, etc. LOL)

My girls are cute!!!

My girls are so dang cute!

Lori and I went on a run today and the girls (Alyssa and Ashley… 13 and 11) rode their bikes next to us. They cut out early when we rounded a corner by the house and rode their bikes in our cul-de-sac.

When Lori and I finished running, we didn’t see the girls. As we turned up our driveway we saw them sitting by the house playing with something on the ground. You have to realize how creative my Alyssa is… she makes little crafts or projects out of any household utensil! Don’t ask!

Here’s what we saw.

Yeah… they have different colored leaves as checkers! (the board is made from bark fragments ground into the sidewalk). Alyssa claims they were going to play blackjack, but they thought it would take too long to mark up all the leaves.

🙂