Reilly's Visit

Reilly's Visit

The past few months we have seen Reilly every month which has been really great! It's hard to have her so far away. This time she was home for 10 days. She was really bummed to have missed out on seeing most of the family though. Particularly my sister, Jordin, and her family who live in Kansas City.

We headed right back out to the lake to help get some more things done. This time much of our work was repair work. The lake house has gotten super run down over the past several years without my grandma living there and no one really doing any up keep. The place was falling apart. Tyler replaced nearly every light fixture in the entire place and installed multiple ceiling fans. Reilly and I painted our butts off. My mom is painting the entire inside and really lightening things up. Kameron and Tyler moved about a million boxes and took so many loads from my mom's house to the lake and about a million other things. Even Ailey and Bryn worked every day sorting and organizing. We all drove more loads than I can count to the dump, goodwill, and to my mom's storage unit.

We would head out to the dock each day at about 4:30 pm and most of us would end up like this:

Sound asleep!!

It was super hot and there is no A/C in the lake house or in Lilac Lodge (the cabin) so it was great to be able to cool off each afternoon.

Tyler and I had a standing date at 8pm every night and would head out on our paddle board and kayak. This was a wonderful way to wind down after a super busy day and it allowed us to get away from the chaos for an hour. It was so nice! It stays light for quite a while this far north so we would just be returning home when the light was gone. So relaxing. Tyler prefers kayaking to paddleboarding and I most definitely prefer paddleboarding!!

View from my paddleboard

View from Tyler's kayak.

Our family did the cooking and a couple of nights we had a bonfire. We kept things easy and low key. It was nice. Some nights it was just my mom and me and the girls. Tyler and Kam had to run back into Spokane a few times during the week for work.

We did take one day off and headed to Silverwood, the amusement park that is near us, and had an absolutely grand time!! I'll post about that later. It was nice to walk away from this for a day!!

Making some much needed changes and upgrades.

Most mornings the girls would get up super early to get in a little fishing before the work started up. It is so crazy that our girls absolutely LOVE to fish and our son is pretty indifferent about it. He will fish occasionally but he sure isn't going to wake up early for it. Kam enjoyed a lot of napping in the cabin in his down time!! :)

Reilly, on the other hand, absolutely LOVES to fish!! She has her own tacklebox and fishing poles and gear. She refuses to use our family's hodge-podge of fishing supplies. She loves to fish in Utah both on her own and with my brother Kirk. My Grandpa McKinnon would be so proud!! She even fishes in some of his favorite fishing spots. She is super passionate about fishing which is so crazy since she is also such a girlie-girl in so many other ways. She has gotten Ailey and Bryn excited about fishing over the years and they happily get up at the crack of dawn to fish with her.

She was also adamant that games were still played in the evenings despite exhaustion!!

Reilly also kept us stocked up on raspberries and picked 90% of them herself with occasional help from Kameron. He spent most of his time in the berry patch eating them and Ailey and Bryn are terrible berry pickers!! Too many bees. She also took these cool pictures that I stole from her Instagram account. :)

Tempers were a lot less flaring with my own family versus when the whole family was in town. THANK GOODNESS!! But Tyler and I still needed to sneak away once in awhile for a few mini-dates to Spirit Lake for Avatars.

Bryn and Reilly liked to come into our room and jump in bed with us and chat in the mornings. They are also our only children who liked to sleep with us when they were little...and apparently still do!! Ailey and Kameron never liked to. They were perfectly fine sleeping in their own beds each night. For Reilly we had to have a sticker chart and treats just to get her the heck out when she was little! Ha ha!!

We headed home a day and a half before Reilly had to fly back to Utah. It was great to be back at our house and to have time to relax and unwind and to have fun together as a family. We watched movies and ate out. One night we headed out at midnight and drove an hour north because the Northern Lights were forecast to be visible from our area. We loaded up the suburban with all of the kids in pajamas and blankets and drove out to a remote area. We were cautiously hopeful! We have done this before and then the Northern Lights ended up not being visible and we were super disappointed. This time we were not. We ended up parking out in a big dark field and it turned out to be one HILARIOUS night!! We told ghost stories and dared one another. We waited for about an hour for something to happen and low and behold it did!! It was faint...more like a shimmering of pale light on the horizon...not the brilliant greens and purples you normally think of but we definitely saw SOMETHING and we were happy about it. We were about an hour and a half away from the Canadian border and we heard that the lights were much brighter in Canada. Some people in our area with special cameras got some great pictures. It was really cool!!

The next day we hung out at the park and played games. Reilly was dying to play Kubb since she missed out on all of our other games so we were happy to oblige!!

Team One

Team 2

Things started off great and the first round was fantastic. Kameron, Ailey, and I won. The second round was terrible. Tyler, Reilly, and Bryn won. The games took forever ever because we were so evenly matched and there were some poor sports...cough cough...Ailey.

Thirteen is precious.

By that time everyone was testy and it wasn't fun anymore so we quit and had some forced family togetherness. Everyone had cram on a picnic blanket whether you want to or not.

When everyone could be nice again they were allowed to leave the picnic blanket and go buy ice cream. After that we went out for mexican food and had a great time.

The next day Reilly flew back to Utah after we had a girls lunch at Hogan's. Tyler and Kameron were back at work and Ailey was babysitting for my sister...vacay over. We had a great visit with Reilly and got a bunch of stuff done for my mom at the lake. Win-Win.

4th of July 2017

4th of July 2017

The 4th of July turned out to be a pretty hectic and crazy time. At the end of June my mom and her three remaining siblings spent a weekend at the lake sorting through my grandma's belongings. My mom's siblings took what they wanted and basically said sayonara and left two houses full of stuff (my grandma's house and its adjoining cabin and six garages full of stuff ...mostly junk...to deal with) plus my mom wanted to at least get partially moved out of her house so that she could sleep at the lake and could put her house on the market. That still hasn't happened. My out-of-state siblings all returned back to town just a few weeks later to help with that enormous undertaking. It still isn't even close to being done and it is going to take months. Knowing the huge undertaking before us...my siblings moved up their vacation time to come to the lake earlier. Unfortunately, this screwed things up for Reilly who had purchased her plane tickets months ago and already had her time off scheduled. She was stuck and couldn't rearrange things and ended up coming up later in the month which was a bummer for her.

The days preceding the holiday were work days and the days following the holiday were work days (for the adults and Kam) with really only a break on the fourth. I'm not going to lie it was exhausting. It was also super hot, emotional, and tempers were flaring. It wasn't our best week as a family. In fact, it was pretty dreadful. So much arguing.

My first walk through my grandma's house after its gutting had me in tears. I don't do well with change and seeing her house stripped of her belongings and being painted and changed was wrenching even though I know that the changes made are positive ones. The lake house and cabin and property have just been slowly falling into disrepair over the past few years. But despite all of that, we did manage to have some fun and we did have a great fourth of July celebration. The cousins had a ball and enjoyed one another despite all of the drama, tempers, work, and exhaustion of the adults.

4th of July food Prep began bright and early:

My brother Kirk making a fantastic brisket.

Stacey made her buttermilk biscuits.

We decorated:

Jaylah, Bryn, Elle, Kaiya, River, Ailey

We got spruced up in our red, white, and blue...which included some bright red lipstick for these firecrackers!! Such cute girls.

The cousins minus Reilly and Kam: Front row: RJ. Middle row: Kaiden, Jaylah, Bryn, Elle, Kaiya, Kirin, River, Ailey. Back Row: Dane.

Uncle Tyler helping Dane tie his tie.

The boat was decorated for the yearly boat parade and the water balloons were filled:

Traditional 4th of July pictures were taken:

Cute boys!! Kam and Kaiden

Then it was time to head out for the boat parade. We had two boats in the parade this year: the ski boat and the fishing boat.

Elle, Dane, Jaylah

Meki

John, Kam, RJ, and Kaiden

The parade always starts with Lady Liberty leading the way.

Ramon and Kelley defending our dock against our lake nemesis who comes around squirting people on their docks with a fire hose. The boat parade is really one big lake water fight and it is always a lot of fun!!

The rest of the day was spent enjoying the water and eating:

Jaylah and River

John and Ty

Then it was time for fireworks:

We had a great fireworks show this year!!

Bryn sacked out in the boat and under the floaties during the fireworks. Poor kid!!

The rest of our family reunion truly was a bunch of long hot sweaty work days...all day...every day. There was/is just so much to do. My grandma never sorted all of the belongings of her parents and her in-laws and other family members. She literally saved every thing. As a child of the depression she had boxes of ripped out zippers and collars and every receipt for everything that she ever bought in her entire life. 45 years worth of old rotten food storage items. We found boxes labeled "Nelle's bathroom cabinet", "Ladye's bathroom cabinet", "The Folks bathroom cabinet". After these various family members died she literally just put all of the contents of their bathroom cupboards in boxes and sealed them up. Old shampoo, half used shaving cream, old tooth paste, half full bottles of lotion. It was crazy. There was just so much literal garbage. Like I said there are several months of work still to be done.

Moving my mom's furniture

We also had to move all the big and heavy items from my mom's house while there were a bunch of people to help.  My mom has nearly as much stuff as my grandma. Plus there were so many repairs that needed to be done and still need to be done to the lake house and to my mom's house.

When we weren't trying to kill one another...and believe me the struggle was REAL...we felt a lot like this:

We were all going crazy!!

The tweens were great to babysit all the little kids all day long while the adults and Kam worked but they managed to have some fun too.

Kaiya, Dane and Ailey

The younger kids played and swam and tried to keep out of the way:

Bryn has gotten to be such a great little swimmer this year!!

I definitely did a lot of night swimming to rinse off all of the dust, dirt, and grime from the day. Plus it was super hot.

We did have a few bonfires but I attended very few...I was so freaking tired. Tyler and I couldn't wait to say good-night and good-bye and head to bed each night.

Finally our week was over and everyone headed home for some much needed rest. We were only home for a couple of days before Reilly flew in and we headed back out for ten more days.

All in all, we got a lot done and managed to have some fun...especially on the 4th of July. God Bless America. :)