New tradition at my house

I am so very lucky to have my 3 children and their families living close to me. We have family get-togethers often with all 20 of us (kids and grandkids) and they are fun and they are hectic and loud. The cousins are best friends and get to spend a lot of time with each other. At these family events the grown ups get a little time to talk to each other, but usually we get interrupted numerous times by those great kids I was referring to. So I decided that I wanted some time with just my children and their spouses alone.. so the new tradition I started is having a dinner for the 7 of us once a month. My daughter said "oh a free date nite". I told them I wanted an evening that we could just be together, share thoughts, play a game or just sit and talk. We had our first dinner on Saturday evening and it was so much fun. I fixed chicken divan, Mandarin orange oriental salad, rice and sour cream pineapple pie. ( new recipes I got from Judy when I was at her house). We ate on the patio and had such a wonderful evening. We talked, laughed and shared thoughts. Steve has immersed himself into a new project of working on our family history and shared with us some stories of his adventures. He showed everyone how to log on to the Internets family history web site and see our heritage line. On Friday Steve & I discovered my great-great grandparents on a genealogy sheet that I had been working on years ago. When we added their names to the existing ones Steve had entered.....It took us back to "1481" and 20 generations in my family. He was so excited to share this with each of us.. We finally wrapped up the evening around 11pm. It was so much fun to have them over and I'm looking forward to next month and being able to share an evening with them again.

The best gifts are the people in our lives and the moments we share.

Happiness is not perfected until it is shared

Jane Porter