100th Birthday Celebration

For Thanksgiving we traveled to Arizona to join over 100 other relatives from my mom's side to celebrate my Grandpa and Grandma Westover's 100th birthdays! Neither of my grandparents are alive, but if they were they would have been delighted to see so many of their descendants together for the occasion! It was fun to take part in this huge family reunion. Even with as many as are pictured above, there were still many grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even great, great grandchildren who could not attend. All of my grandparents' five children and their spouses were present: Joan (blue t-shirts are her kids, grand kids, and great-grand kids), Jim (turquoise t-shirts...a lot of his couldn't be there), Nancy (yellow t-shirts are her kids and grand kids), Carol (red t-shirts are her kids, grand kids...including us, she's my mom!), Bruce (brown t-shirts are his kids and grand kids.) What an amazing legacy!

Aaron, the girls, and I traveled Thanksgiving day, arrived that night and had dinner with my parents at my Aunt Nancy's house. The rest of my siblings arrived later that night. The next morning the reunion officially began. We enjoyed seeing aunts, uncles, and cousins we hadn't seen for years! There we activities like volleyball, basketball, humanitarian projects, and lots of display tables with old pictures and grandma and grandpa's memorabilia...but mostly we just visited. We had a big turkey dinner and later that night the celebration continued with watching a DVD that my dad had created on the life and heritage of my grandparents, followed by birthday cake and games. The next morning we had breakfast and said good-bye. What a lot of fun!

Me with my siblings who were there: Shawn, Tausha, Jason, Jeremy, me, Jonathan

All of my parents' grandchildren

Grace and Eve were obsessed with their new baby cousin, Savannah (Jonathan's little girl)

After leaving the reunion we had the privilege of visiting my best friend Julyssa and her family who happen to live only about thirty minutes away from where my Aunt does! We spent Saturday afternoon playing with them until early evening when Julyssa took our family portraits (she's a photographer.) Afterwards we had dinner and continued our fun. Their little girl Nyomi got along so well with Grace. We hardly saw them because they were off playing in Nyomi's room most of the time. They even had a slumber party that night in sleeping bags! We spent the night at their house and headed home the next morning after going to church with them. What a long drive home it was!