Zachreson Family Reunion

Sorry that I'm a day late this week. We had a family reunion for my side of the family this weekend, and we were still driving home yesterday.

We left on my birthday (Thurs June 25) and drove all the way to Oakley, CA. It took us 15 hours! We made quite a few stops and some of them were at least an hour. Clara actually did pretty good too. She only got fussy a few times as we were driving all weekend!

The first thing we did was went canoeing. The kids were so excited to go. My mom watched the 3 youngest kids (including Clara) while the older kids got to go. We had so much fun. This is on the Sacramento River, but right where it enters the Bay. It was so pretty!Next we wend to a place called Pump It Up. We had the whole place reserved for just our family. The kids loved it. I've never seen Jed so happy. I could hardly get any good pictures of the kids. They were running around all over the place and never wanted to stay in once place long enough to get a picture. In this picture, the kids were on top of a big ball. Jeremy would run and jump on the ball and see how many kids he could knock off. The kids LOVED this game and it wore Jeremy out. Clara didn't really like it though. She was scared of how big everything was. She just sat and played with the door stop and loved every minute of that. By the end, she would crawl up on the blue mats at the bottom of the slides and "jump." She thought she was so big and having so much fun just like the other kids. It made me laugh.We also made it to go see some Redwood Trees. I loved hearing the kids talk about our little walk. They would say things like, "Hey, were in nature!" Growing up in Montana, I was too used to "being in nature" to really think things like that were cool. It made me giggle how excited the kids were to see a "wild animal squirrel" and other amazing things like that. We ended the reunion by having a BBQ with some extended family. My Aunt and Uncle (who would come visit us every year in MT) came with 3 of their 4 kids. I loved getting to visit with my cousins and Aunt and Uncle. Now that my immediate family is grown and lives so far away from each other, all our vacations are spent visiting with them. I never get to see my cousins and things, so it was great to have those few hours with them.

On our way back from California, we stopped in Reno to visit with one of Jeremy's cousins. It was the happiest I had seen Ken. I'm so glad he likes Reno. It was so fun to see him too. He has an extremely old dog that is so relaxed and pretty much just laid around. Clara loved seeing the dog, but anytime it would meander close by, she got pretty scared. It made me laugh. I was really scared of dogs at her age too. Like Mother like Daughter I guess.