Since there were plans to go out, we wore our group shirts today. They weren't normal group shirts that matched, but everyone chose a funny shirt and we wore them on the same day. It was so much fun seeing what shirt everyone chose as people slowly got ready for the day. Heather also made pancakes for breakfast!
Heather woke up early and decided to go for a sunrise walk. I joined her subsequent days, but the sunrise was never as pretty.
The kids, in age order, as always. It was crazy easy to get a good picture this year. I took about ten and almost all of them were good.
Seth's shirt was "Let's eat kids. Let's eat, kids. Punctuation saves lives." So I encouraged Isaac to lay on the table and gave Seth some silverware and think it is the cutest picture.
Group photo! Since it's a bit hard to tell, here are the shirts:
Amanda: Awwsassin, with a ninja cat
Ben: Got any grapes? with a duck
Laura: My plan has been foiled, with FOIL diagram
Dusty: Yes, I'm always right, with a right angle
Katy: It's called a trash can, not a trash cannot, with a racoon
Ryan: We almost always almost win, with University of Minnesota football
Heather: Knock - knock joke with oranges and bananas
Doug: What exactly don't you understand, with lots of chemical symbols
Isaac: i saying be rational and Pi saying get real
Joshua: I've got your back, with a stick figure holding another figure's back
Marshall: Why do developers like dark mode? Because light attracts bugs
Violet: (sqrt(-1))(2^2)sigma(3.14): I ate some pie
Greta: animals called by funny names, such as a llama as giraffe sheep, manta as sand flap flap, and Guinea pig as furry potato.
Dagne: pieces of cheese saying 'say people!'
Eva: maybe broccoli doesn't like you either, with a picture of a cool broccoli
Seth: Let's eat kids. Let's eat, kids. Punctuation saves lives.
We went mini golfing after pictures. It was indoor golfing and that was the nicest thing ever. They also had some interesting holes, including a caldera. Oh! Somehow I managed to be the overall winner too.
Heather got her first hole-in-one!
In the afternoon the kids got out some diamond art and got really into it.
Greta and I talked about books.
The adults talked. This is what we looked like a lot of the time.
We also pulled out a puzzle! It is a group picture from each of the years we've gone on vacation together - there were ten pictures, so I guess this means this was our tenth vacation! That's kind of crazy to think about.
The clock didn't work. People enjoyed changing the time.
For the evening's entertainment, we went to a pirate show with dinner. It was really fun. The food was good and the pirates were entertaining.
There was a pre-show that they recommended that you arrive for. It felt like we were in the way back seats for that, but in the end it didn't matter. There was a little story to go along with it - the crew was recruiting a new pirate - but it was not amazing. There was a song about how you should go buy food, drinks, and souvenirs that definitely sounded like a pirate chanty but the words did not match at all since it was just an advertisement. Heather cracked up and couldn't stop laughing. There was also a sing-along. Then we got to file into our seats and Joshua was overheard saying, "Phew. I'm glad that wasn't the whole thing."
It was overall a low budget cir-de-sol, which worked well for us. There was diving into the water. There was fire. There were trained animals. There was a competition between the two pirate sides and the end and that was rigged. You could tell that one side let the other side win so that the score could stay even. But how else can it end in a tie so that everyone is happy at the end?
We got home with enough time to hit sunset, so back to the beach we went.
Joshua collected a pile of shells. Isaac dug holes.
Katy found a crab on the way back.
Isaac and I wore our pun pajamas.
Ryan finally hit the ice pops. He had held himself back until now, although part of that might have been that we had the worst freezer ever. It didn't make ice and it didn't freeze things. (It did keep them cold, but that was about it.)
I lied, it did make ice. It made fancy ice balls at the rate of six per day - the normal ice maker was broken. There was an ice cube tray in the freezer and the water did freeze, so I would make about 24 cubes a day and dump them into the ice holder. It wasn't really enough, but it did the job.
We also played our biannual game of poker. I wasn't out first, but it was close.
Ryan took all of Dusty's money. In grad school it was a running joke that Ryan had to be careful where he sat or Dusty would take all of his money, so the joke persists.
