Tuesday, July 29, 2008

We want to live there.....

We just returned from Bear Lake yesterday. My cousins all have blogs and so my sister Amanda and I decided to be "cool" and blog as well. Our goal was to start our blog today. What better way to start than to post fun vacation pictures. First, I must tell you that Nat (my husband) named our blog. We love the fact that we have three wonderful, talented and amazing daughters. He thought wouldn't 3Dotters be a great name for a publishing company? Well, since I don't see any publishing company in our future we decided to name our blog 3Dotters. I guess we are publishing something.

Back to our vacation.....we spent 3 fun days with our family. It is somewhat of a tradition for our family to go to Bear Lake for a reunion. My grandparents (who are 82 and still alive) started taking our family to Bear Lake when I was about 14 or so. Since those humble beginnings of 20 or so our family has grown to over 50. Each family rents a condo at Ideal Beach. We have tried other places, but Ideal Beach (formally Sweetwater) is our favorite. Now each of my grandparents children (my mom is the oldest of 5) rents a condo for their family. So this year in my parent's condo there was me and my family, my sister Amanda and her family, my sister Melissa and her family and my brother Ryan. We would do our own thing during the day and get together with our aunts, uncles and cousins to share dinner and have family home evening. Each night a different family did dinner. Our night was Sunday and we did taco salad. We have done this for the last 2-3 years. Any new ideas let me know! Remember we need to feed 50 and be cost effective.

This year our family home evenings centered on our ancestors and each family was assigned different parts of our family. We were assigned my grandparents. I specifically had to talk about how my grandpa proposed to my grandmother. It was fun talking with grandma, I really didn't know the story. I will probably post that story in our blog later this week. I also brought fun pictures of them from the 40's when they were so young. Sometimes it's hard to believe how young they once were. I really love my grandparents and can't imagine them not being on this earth with us. I have never had anyone in my family really close to me die, and it's hard to believe that someday they will be gone too. My uncle's families talked our our pioneer ancestors who came over from Europe as young members of the church. The stories were fun and really inspiring. We also had a family auction that we have been doing for 3 years to raise some money for our family fund. I think it is really fun, but I'm not sure everyone in our family is into it. Time goes by so fast up there and before we knew it we were ready to go home. We have decided that next year we will stay a whole week. Well, I titled this entry because on our way home Bronwyn said "Mom can we buy a condo and live at Bear Lake?" It is truly a joy to be there, surrounded by the most beautiful lake in Utah (I think) and be with the people we love the most.