Slide Rock, Lava Tubes and Arm Wrestling

I learned a lot about blogging from Tiffany this past week. She claims she doesn't know that much about blogging, but she knows quite a bit more than me, so that makes her an expert in my opinion. She had a cool way of putting the captions with the photos they belonged to, rather than just having a row of photos and line after line of text, as with mine! But I wasn't paying close enough attention, as I forgot how she did it! So you get to keep repeating my same old format till I get in touch with her again!

Our family has incredible gratitude for Blaine and Tiff and all the effort they put into making Flagstaff an incredibly fun place to visit. We went to places unbeforeheardof (my new word) and discovered the amazing territory that the Grand Canyon and Flagstaff have to offer. Truly beautiful country!

Gramma B actually allowed us to drag her into the water at slide rock. This was an accomplishment in and of itself as she barely learned how to swim within the last decade! Also because she was fully dressed! She actually got to her neck in the water and swam around, all the time wearing a shocked expression on her face! WAY TO GO GRAMMA!

The kids all jumped off the cliff. My favorite is Jerica doing her buff girl pose just prior to jumping! TOO CUTE! We got all the boy cousins together for some posing. It was funny to see Jake force Dan-Dan to put his muscles up the right way!

I couldn't go into the water because of the high bacteria levels and my majorly infected burn and healing scar on my legs, but I came along and played photographer and was insanely jealous of how cooled off everyone got to get (it was HOT HOT HOT!) they were all more than willing to throw cold bottles of water on me at random moments, so I did get to get a little wet!

We did the Observatory on Thursday night, which was fascinating to see the planets and stars so close up. We played games, went on walks, shared stories and pulled together as a family. It was GREAT. Grampa B handed out amazing Bird Family Reunion T-Shirts with all the families names on the back. All the kids loved that feeling of being a part of a large group of people that 'belonged'! Everyone wore their t-shirts and made comments on everyones photos on the back. When we got home, Zach and Jerica wore theirs again when they went to play with friends and I overheard them explaining to their friends, "...and this is my Uncle Dan and these are all his kids but not all of them were there...and Jake is really funny and cool and is a goofball and Dan Dan is really smart and Mathew he's really nice but kinda quiet, but this is all my family and we got to meet them and it was SO COOL." (jerica)