Scooter Extended Family Evening

After spending a few hours helping Kyle move his brother into his new house (honestly, this was so different from helping LissyJo move - there were a few prepacked trailers and a wait between trailers, nothing that weighed several hundred pounds, and it was all over in just a few hours) out Monticello way and drinking at Kyle's place in the interim, both he and I went to the Scooter extended family gathering.

This was a particularly strange event. My dad was in town, and my grandmother ("old grandma" as Ollie and Eryn call her), Dad's mother, on their way up from Arizona to Montana, where grandma summers. Usually when the extended family is in town we plan dinner. This often goes poorly (the planning) as no one is particularly interested in taking charge. This instance of dining was complicated by the fact that my sister and brother-in-law wanted to celebrate their birthdays on the evening Grandpa and Old Grandma were here and we'd already agreed to watch my niece while they were out. Cookie Queen was also wondering what we were up to and whether we might want to get the kids together. So I made an executive decision: steaks at LissyJo's house while we watched my niece, Amelie. LissyJo and her husband could go out on the town, Dan'l and Cookie Queen could drop off P'mon and go out on the town, my dad and old grandma could hang with us, and my brother and his family (Ollie and Artie) could show up as well. Kyle - because he's a masochist, joined us.

So, there was an evening of four children, ages 1-3, running around, diving off cement steps (I served as cement step ride master for a while - exhausting - here you can see who started the whole cement step diving phenomena), eating bags of Doritos, attempting to play C's drums (under careful supervision of course), watching bits of Chicken Run, and scarfing what seemed like a whole Archer Farms bag of M&M, chocolate chips, and raisin-peanut gorp.

For those of you with four children all 9 months apart - you're insane.

As an added bonus for my sister, who had her brand new house taken over while she was gone, and her dishes dirtied, and beer consumed, gorp devoured, and stuff generally messed with, I took the three tinfoil-wrapped leftover baked potatoes and put them in her bed. Originally I wanted to put them under the pillow - but I thought this might get really messy, so I set them up like little people. Kyle, however, had the great idea that it might make sense to put them at the foot of the bed where they'd freak someone out when bumped by unsuspecting toes, so I had to go back and rearrange. LissyJo is short, so maybe she didn't notice, but I'm sure C did. Did you have hashbrowns for breakfast? It can be very annoying to know me or be related to me, but I'm not dangerous.

Here's a picture of the youngest and oldest members at the Scooter family grill out. Artie usually reserves that expectant look for anyone with a bottle of beer, but I think in this case Drew has some other food at hand.