Memorial Day 2009

The Phillips family has a tradition every Memorial Day weekend to get together and have a Sunday picnic out at West Valley Cemetery. They clean up their Grandpa and Grandma Phillips graves and reminisce about the all the good memories they had with them. Since Adam's Grandpa was fairly young when he died, Adam and his siblings have great memories of their Grandma taking pride in cleaning his graveside. Since then many others in his family have passed on, so its a busy weekend of taking flowers around and cleaning gravesides. This year we were not planning on going up there, but on Sunday we awoke and decided to surprise everyone at the picnic. Since Chase and Amanda had been down here visiting us they knew we were coming, the picnic almost got cancelled because of the rain, and Chase worked it out that they still had a get together with all the cousins at Sandie's house. It was so fun to sneak in her house with Dylan and Mason. She was in the dinning room setting the table up when we snuck up behind her and said "surprise" I have never seen her so shocked, she just stared at us for a min. in disbelief. It was cute. This year was the first time Dylan could understand the graveside thing and had lots and lots of questions.

I have to laugh at this picture. We wanted to get a picture of us on Adam's dads grave. As many of you know there is a small window of opportunity getting kids to look at the camera. Chase thought it would be funny to pop in without us knowing. We had no idea he was even in this picture until I looked to approve, the second one we took didn't turn out, I will always get a good laugh out of this.

The pre-photo chaos (notice Chase sneaking in at the bottom left corner

The Fam! Everyone is looking and smiling at the camera. YAY

The fam again. With Christian being blind he has no idea where to turn his head to, so this was one was "take one".

Our Dylan at his Uncle Dylan's graveside

Adam is patiently answering his questions. He thinks so deep.

Mason being the happy go lucky boy he is.