Fourth of July

For my entire pre-DC life, my family spent the Fourth at the Oregon Coast with all of my mom's family. Unfortunately, I haven't been back since I moved here almost nine years ago (what?!?), and for the rest of my siblings it has been hit and miss. Finally, Mom decided that we were going to make a tradition of going back to Oregon for the Fourth every five years--2010 being the first five-year Bunn family reunion.

We had a great time, totally worth the long (red-eye) flights. It turns out none of our spouses had ever done the Bunn family Fourth, so they were all in for a treat. We did all the usual favorites, like:

Games on the beach:Troy with his shovel

Mason, Cole, and Spencer take off in gunny sacks

Shaanti relives her volleyball glory days

Mason wants to play, too!

Hot dog and s'more roasting:

Casey and Peter, frying up some dogs

The Lap Sit (36 people this year!):


The Annual Talent Show:

Cole clearly follows in Auntie Bunda's footsteps with the famous "spoon from the nose" talent

Chatty Katie

This one was something about bananas, from the people who brought you the bottle dance about 20 years ago...

Observing the chaos

Setting off questionably legal fireworks and lots of sparklers (Dad pulled out his stash of sparklers from ten years ago--they still worked like a charm):

A gleeful--and highly supervised--Mason and Troy with sparklers

Cole's sparkler fun

This was right before our turn to set off sparklers...

This year we did some portrait painting...


...and some whale watching. Unbelievably, there was a baby grey whale right near the surf, and we got to see it spout and flip its tail. Dad thought it was a shark at first--I thought he was going to high tail it for the hills for a second there!

Duh, dum...duh dum...

We had a great time getting together with everyone, and it was especially fun that the boys were old enough to have fun with the sparklers and pop-its (even though Cole jump at the first "bang!" (boy after my own heart) and Mason decided to go ahead and grab the sparkling part of the sparkler...).

It was a long trip for everyone, and on Monday morning we packed into our cars and headed to Portland, texting each other about stopping for Starbucks every 15 minutes or so. When we finally got there, we all had lunch together at the Spaghetti Factory before heading off in our separate directions. Jason and I didn't fly out until late that night, and we had the pleasure of spending the afternoon with Krystal, who drove down to pick up Katie for a summer at the mission church where she works (seriously small world, people). Love Krystal. We spent a delightful afternoon at Powell's and then grabbed a red-eye home.

Seriously, don't you wish you'd been there for the Talent Show?!?