Stephens Games

The Stephens family gathered in Island Park last weekend for the family reunion.

Almost everyone was there (we were missing Kensey's family) including 81 year old Grandma Luain.

  Gracie and I didn't join the river rats that floated/canoed the river. It sounds like they had fun, the boys ended up in a raft being towed by Chod's canoe. The boys may have "fallen in" a few times and needed rescuing by dad. One of those rescues resulted in in a tipped canoe and a drowned iPhone. I told him not to take it. And Amy told him to at least double the ziploc bags if he was going to take it. He didn't listen to either of us.

 We went to Mack's Inn theater for Home School Musical 2.

 Chod was picked from the audience to be part of the show. They had him hula hoop. He did great. Rumor has it, that it was his dad that threw him under the bus.

We were divided into 3 teams and got to chose our team name and paint our team flag.
Lincoln and I were Killer Teddy Bears. Ricky and Michaela jumped right in designing our flag.

Bentley was a Sharguar--a combination of sharks and jaguars. They aimed to please everyone.

Chod and JJ were left in charge of the Killer Bee flag. Then Chod abandoned JJ partway through to help Lincoln with his problems. Poor Linky was sick on Sunday.

There were pinatas to celebrate the summer birthdays. The under 8 crowd had a pull string pinata and the over 8 were provided a traditional one. Bentley was string puller #2 and he opened the thing up. When I asked him how he did it he said, "Oh that was easy. I looked and there were 3 strings that could open it, so I just pulled one of them." Next year he may get promoted to the traditional pinata.

We roasted marshmallows in the fireplace and had fun hearing family stories.

Monday morning the family Olympics began.

Chod in the javelin throw.

Here's the Angry Bird archery set up. Bentley killed all the birds on his try. He's had a lot of practice it seems. Bentley kept checking the scores to see which team was ahead. But he was in good company as he isn't the only competitive Stephens boy in the bunch.

Lincoln soccer ball bowling.

Looking for the big fish at Big Springs.

We never saw the fish but the kids had fun dipping their toes in the cold water.

After the scores were tallied medals were giving out. Chod's team took 3rd, Bentley's team 2nd (and he was okay with that)

And Linky and I placed 1st.

 After the medal ceremonies, the reunion auction began. It's become tradition that Larry Loot is given out during the reunion and then we use that Loot to buy goods that we all contribute.

It was fun to spend 4 days hanging out with the Stephens family.