Family & Memories

Even though my last trip home was for a sad reason I was glad to see family. This picture was taken at my aunt Won's house in Oregon while we were gathered for the memorial service weekend.

When I was a little girl I remember the big family gatherings we would have at Uncle John's house. All the cousins were there and we had so much fun. I remember everyone getting together at Grandma Myrt's house on Thanksgiving and Christmas. We all ate too much and played games until late in the night. I can remember just feeling like your stomach would give a little relief from that over stuffed feeling and then squeezing in one more piece of homemade pie or some of grandma's homemade candies.

The family has grown and branched out and those large gatherings are few and far between these days.

Coming up on the holidays makes me reminisce all those childhood memories. 

I intentionally left out the nail-biting, horrifying winter/snow experiences with my dad to go get Christmas trees.Too many of those stories.

One of my favorite memories was when we(me, Alanna, & Eric) had been out with dad along with my cousins, Jenny and Ryan, to get Christmas trees. We were in my dads 1980 something 4x4 Bronco and on our way back after acquiring the trees. We had taken two runner sleds with us, and when we had descended from the deeper snow mountain roads to where they began to plow, we thought it looked perfect for a sled ride.

Of course with only two sleds we came up with the bright idea that me and Jenny would share a sled and Eric and Alanna shared the other (we laid down and double stacked....probably not safe but definitely more aerodynamic). Poor Ryan missed out!

It was just getting dark but we shot off on those runner sleds and we quickly lost my dads headlights and had to begin to see in the dark and some of those corners in the mountains got pretty dark! We began to drag our feet to no avail; we were flying!! I'm not sure how many miles we covered but we managed a system of anything that looked like a shadow looming ahead we steered to avoid it and that worked out really good. Finally, we flew across a cattle guard, which slowed us enough, to ditch into the snow bank.

Later, back in the vehicle I learned from my father that he gave up trying to catch us after the Bronco hit 25-30mph on slick mountain roads. So we were really going super fast. Of course we had a blast and thought it was the greatest fun. My father told me later in years that he shouldn't have let us do it. 

I will have to share more sledding stories later!