Faaaaamily weekend!

lookin' good!

I guess you could say I grew up a little different than most. My Grandmother and Grandaddy (my mom's parents), my mom's brother (Uncle Steve), his wife (Aunt Barb), their 3 kids Jeana, Phillip & Cassidy and my parents, brother (Brandon) and I all grew up as neighbors. So to say we are close is an understatement! It was basically like always having 4 siblings around to hang out with, which was always a lot of fun. Some of my favorite memories that stick out from our childhood are: the countless summers we spent at Harkers Island, playing hide-and-seek, building couch cushion forts and watching the Price is Right, building forts in the woods, building forts out of boxes (we really liked forts!), eating raw turnips from the garden (weird), Cassidy and I playing barbie dolls/baby dolls/mall on the steps/paint shop/school, flash light tag and kickball. 

Now that we are all married or almost married (yay Cassidy!), we obviously don't get to spend quite as much time together, but when we can we try and get together for what we call "faaaamily night."

The "faaam" minus Jeana, Corey and Martin

Luckily none of us married weirdos, so we all get along great and love spending time together. A couple of weekends ago Sally and Phillip, "Sallip" if you will, invited us all over for dinner since it had been a while since the last family gathering. "Sallip" made a great dinner for us and Phillip even whipped up some homemade chocolate ice cream that was AWESOME! But for some strange reason CJ was veryyy suspicious about this ice cream and had to be talked into eating it.

The boys trying to talk CJ into eating his ice cream

Aubrey was really into Faaamily night!

CJ was very excited about the Wolfpack win!!

  After dinner Jeana had to take the kiddos home to bed, but the rest of us stayed and decided to "Get Wacky." And no, that probably doesn't mean what you think it does. Wacky Six is a card game that is VERY complicated and VERY intense. We split up into 4 teams of 2 (couples) and started what would be about 3-4 hours of wackiness. At the beginning of each round you have to designate someone to say "LET'S GET WACKY!!" to start... obviously I chose Martin for this job because he is the most outgoing of us all. (sidenote: that is not true, which made it hilarious!) So the game started off innocent enough, we were all laughing and having a great time. Well about 2 hours in, things got ugly. There was a point in time when I didn't think a few of us would ever speak again. We laughed about how if we played much longer "Sallip" would kick us out of their house and none of us would ever speak of the night's events again. Obviously I'm being dramatic, but there were a few close calls...especially when Martin and Cassidy started cheating. Haha : )

But all joking aside, it really was the most I've laughed in a long time and I am so thankful to have my family in one place and still be able to spend time together on a pretty regular basis!