Waco Family Reunion

The whole Hayes clan gathered in Waco to celebrate all the August and September birthdays in our family. Hannah and Isaac already had a joint birthday party planned at the Waco water park, so we all partied there! Hazel loved the lazy river and being in her float.

Sometimes her legs get stuck in the float...

How cute are these two?

Here's sweet Miles!

Other than the issue of Hazel loudly resisting naptime, the weekend was lots of fun and relaxing. There were so many new things to look at and cousins to play with that Hazel hardly required entertainment from me.

Here's Cerra with Faith and Hazel. She's always willing to pick them up and help out!

Isaac is a total rough tough boy, so I think it's cute how sweet he is with Hazel.

We went to the children's museum while we were there and saw the Egyptian exhibit, which was great. I loved it because it reminded me of teaching 6th grade. Plus, Ancient Egypt has always intrigued me. We thought it'd be pretty cool if we could all fit on the camel for a picture... Success!


Our family also decided to do a little different activity this time. Each family member was supposed to choose a topic that we're passionate about and to share it with the rest of the family. We got the idea from our cousins' family reunion. It was fun to have a designated time for each of us to really get into something we love or think a lot about. We may have talked about these topics casually over the weekend, but we wouldn't have had a designated time to go in depth about it. I chose something related to cooking, of course! I demonstrated how to bake a delicious chocolate chip cookie. I think my topic was pretty popular because I had samples. =) Nat told us how to play Bunco, and we played that for our game night; Matt and Kylene joined together on theirs and related a little botany to spiritual life lessons; Angie educated us about sugar and how it's pretty much poison (that was hard to listen to after mine!), Dane talked to us about emergency preparedness, Mom talked about food storage and gave us all wheat grinders (awesome!), Jeff shared his thoughts on family, Dad shared a video and story about a family friend's miracle, and James talked about Dave Ramsey's book, Total Money Makeover. The kids participated by sharing one of their talents or interests. It was awesome! I bet this isn't the last time we'll do this as a family. Thanks, Nat and Jeff, for letting us trash your house all weekend! We had a blast! Next get-together - October 28th for the BYU vs. TCU game at the Cowboys' Stadium!