Family Party, Tennessee and General Exhaustion

Today, I feel like I could fall asleep sitting up. I think I’ve stressed myself out just a little too much over the past five days. With my summer graduate school schedule, Sunday through Wednesday is a marathon regardless of what we do on the weekend, but this past weekend, we also hosted a family reunion so that seems to have put me over the top. It was great to see everyone, though, so it was worth it. I particularly appreciated Becca and Justin’s help Friday and Saturday loaded and unloaded the huge amounts of stuff we had to take.

We turned the party into a surprise 80th birthday party for my Grandma, too, which went great. She seemed to really enjoy herself and virtually everyone thanked me for organizing it so that made me feel good. (Now if I could just get my Kentucky cousins to participate…oh well, their loss! I’ll post pictures from the party over the weekend. I haven’t had a chance to download them yet.

We had a great time in Tennessee visiting Ben, Carrie and Pants a few weekends ago. We broke the pregnancy news to all of them then – I thought Pants might crash the car! Everyone is excited, of course. We went to the Smokies to hike and saw our first black bear, which was very cool. Brandon and I couldn’t resist going into hiking mode, though, which means we blew up the hill ahead of the others. It felt so good to be hiking! Granted, Ben has a 15-month old kid on his back to laden him down, so I assume it is justified. Here is a picture of all of us that Carrie took.