Lincoln City ~ Day 3 ~ Family Photos

It is so rare that we see our extended family that I wanted to take the opportunity to take some family photos.



There were 6 kids in my Mom's family. My Aunt Linda, who passed away 5 years ago this September, was the youngest.  My Uncle Butch (George) is the oldest.  My mom was 4th.  Uncle Butch looks JUST like my grandfather.  Really, the resemblance at this age is startling.  His only child is Dennis, pictured on the right and his "significant other" (of approximately 25 years...I'm guessing) is Marcia.  We consider her family.

My Uncle was the volunteer of the year for OroValley, AZ last year.  He has volunteered for the police force for years.



Uncle Buch and Marcia (pronounced Marsha).



The Royer family.  My Grandfather's side of the family is French, (from Callais, France).  My Mom is 1/2 French and my Grandfather is responsible for the nose that you see repeated in this photo.  We call it the "Royer nose."  Apparently it's a dominant gene.  It's even more prominent in profile. :)



I love this photo of my Mom. She looks so happy...she really loves her brother and is so happy when they are together.



A great photo of Mom and Mike.



Mike's family.  We were trying to get through these quickly (the children were not excited about this exercise at all and it was COLD) and so sadly, I didn't notice that Michelle was positioned funny in the photo until after we were inside and looking at them on the camera.













I love this photo of Mom and the grandkids.  I had to do some photoediting to get it though because what I didn't notice until later was that one of the Grandkids had to go to the bathroom.  And you could tell in EVERY photo....



Exhibit A of why I could never be a professional phototrapher.

And Kaitlin insisted on holding her imaginary baby.



I love this photo of Mike and Michelle.



At this point, as evidenced by my hair, it had started raining.



So while I'm not crazy about how I look in them, they are still nice to have.



Can you tell that Andrew is all done with pictures?



Sweet Matthew was game for one more.



I didn't get a good family photo as it was raining and by that point the kids were toast.  But it wasn't a problem as we went back and did professional photos at the beginning of this month which turned out great.

I actually have more photos that I wanted to post from this day of our relaxing afternoon and some beach fun.  But they'll have to wait for the next post.

Lincoln City ~ Day 2

I didn't take a lot of pictures (by my standards) at the beach this time.  There were a few days that I took quite a few, but when we were at the house I just spent a lot of time in the moment, enjoying the day.

Dan picked up the camera and snapped this one of me while I was reading one afternoon during "cocktail hour" which ended up being at around 5pm daily.  I was sipping a Lemon drop, reading a book, and enjoying the view and the sunshine.  A little piece of heaven.  It makes me think about how I need to carve out more moments like that.  It is so good for the soul & restorative.



We decided it might be fun to do a late celebration of Mom's birthday at the beach since we'd all be together.  So we had a steak dinner, and I made strawberry shortcake for dessert.  Simple, but fun.  The children ate at another table/kitchen bar nearby so they aren't in the photo.  I think we all loved the dinner arrangements!

Sunglasses were necessary at the table from the sun setting on that side of the house.  No complaints, we'll take sunshine any way we can get it!



We ate very well on our vacation, considering each meal was for 16 people.  We rotated responsibility for dinner so that no one was overly burdened and it worked great.  We have some good cooks in our family and dinner was something to look forward to.  Dan gained 12 lbs on our trip!  (And has since lost it).



Happy Birthday, Mom!!



Nana and her grand kids + Grand niece and nephew.  Noah was happy, he is just going through a bit of a phase with the camera after a not so great experience with school pictures.  It's so unfortunate as he has such a great smile and he was so joyful this trip.  This isn't representative at all of how he was on vacation.



Mom said one of her favorite parts of our trip was her birthday gift, which sadly, I can't share as we are giving Winnie the same thing for her birthday and she reads my blog!  :)  Don't want to ruin the surprise!

I have some great shots of Mom's expression opening the gift.  And would you believe those are all the photos I took on this day?  I think that's a beach non-picture taking record for me!  It was really nice just to soak in my time and relax.  A really great start to the week.