Can You Pronounce Shawrogknabski?

Our reunion banner. Complete with red Solo cup lights. Because we're THAT type of family.

We survived the non-wireless world of our family reunion campout weekend. And because I'm so interesting, let me tell you all about it.

The family reunion is a big thing. Like, big. It combines my grandma's extended family (including her TEN kids, and all of their kids and grandkids) with her siblings and their extended family (kids, grandkids, great grandkids etc). Which basically equates to a crapton of people that are all related but we're not always necessarily sure how we're related so we call it the Cousin's Reunion and just assume that if we're not sure how someone is related to us, they're a cousin. And we spend a weekend each summer camping out together and catching up, meeting new "cousins", letting the kids play, have a big picnic on the main day (Saturday), games/contests, and a huge firepit at night.

Footnote: in recent years we have changed the name of the reunion to the Shawrogknabski reunion. It's a bunch of last names smushed together (Shaw, Rogers, Knabe, and "ski" is just for fun). Spelling test on Friday. Start studying.

So it used to be at this campsite on the Snake river every year but due to lameass park rangers not letting us drink and be loud unforeseen circumstances we decided to let the families start hosting them on their enormous properties. This year was in Warden WA (a "cousin"s house). Aka middle of nowhere farmland USA. Absolutely beautiful country and since it's in Eastern Washington, nice weather.

Lost in the middle of nowhere, on our way to the middle of nowhere

We spent Friday just hanging around catching up with everyone/pitching tents/etc. Luckily Ann and Scott (the hosts) have an enormous trampoline that basically sucked out Calen's soul because he was physically attached to the thing for the next two days. Even Camden liked bouncing on it. The big boys shot off rockets in the field and everyone else spectated from the house. Super awesome redneck fun!


The first night was our first experience tent-camping with little kids, and it was AWFUL!!! The boys had their own tent but Cam hated it so he basically cried all night and kept all of us awake. I think Brad and I made an agreement somewhere around 4:30am that our tent-camping days are over and from now on we will use a tent-trailer or RV of some kind.

COUSINS! Playing ring around the rosey. So cute you want to kill yourself.

Saturday was full of the usual reunion awesomeness. All of the little boy cousins (and there are a LOT of freaking boys in this family) were running around the property in this never ending Super Soaker battle, while taking breaks to jump on the trampoline. The really little cousins played endless rounds of "ring around the rosey" on the trampoline too which was pretty much the cutest thing since piles of fuzzy puppies were invented. We had the big family picnic that afternoon followed by the BIG family picture. Trying to get ten thousand people to stare at one camera is like, rocket science.

2012 reunion photo! Naturally neither of my kids are looking.

After the picture came the games, including potato sack races and some fun team games like Tacky Tourist, where teams of five do a relay to dress a teammate in the most ridiculous tourist costumes ever. I got to be the one they dressed this year. And my team totally won first place. From now on you can just call me Champ. I'll even sign an autograph if you ask nicely.

Tacky Tourist CHAMPS. Beth, Samantha, me (dressed lovely for the occassion), Ashlen and some kid I don't know.

The second night was way easier as Cam and I said screw this and slept in the basement of Scott and Ann's house. Brad and Calen roughed it in the tent which basically nearly blew away into Idaho because the wind was so bad.

Today we had breakfast and had planned on hanging out for a while but the boys were all "I'm done with this camping business" and had complete meltdowns so we decided it was time to strap them to a carseat and force them to fall asleep make our way back to the west side.

Super awesome weekend. Really hope we can fly out for next year's.

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