Pioneer Children

We spent Pioneer Day in Oakley, Idaho, where many of my pioneer ancestors spent their pioneer days.  Oakley does Pioneer Day in big style - they always have a race, a special speaker at the church, a barbeque in the park, class reunions everywhere you look, a parade that has apparently turned into a giant Town Water Fight.  My little family has attended the festivities with my BFF Kellie a few times, but we've never done it with my parents and Allyn and her kids before.  What a treat!  Something about being IN the place where our ancestors lived and where we grew up...  It was kind of surreal.  Also, the special guest speaker was Kellie's older brother, Bruce, who is an FBI agent.  I was blown away by his talk - and not just because he used to line Kellie, me, and their youngest brother, Kenny, on our backs next to his bike ramp to see if he could jump that far ("you got like three feet of air that time") and I didn't think he would amount to anything.  Ha!

Allyn made the girls awesome pioneer bonnets (I'm already scheming to get Bridget to be a pioneer girl for Halloween) and my Mom and I were very VERY jealous of those shady brims by the end of the day.  We visited our old homestead and two cemeteries and saw lots of much older, familiar faces.

Bridget claimed she was starving the whole time we were in line for the barbeque, then she made sad eyes and had us spoon feed her the entire lunch.  But the bonnet!  It is SO CUTE.

Kellie let me hold the smaller of her Super Sized Twins, Nick and Max.  My arms were still trembling afterward, though. :)

Bridget and Lilja playing "house" in the middle of the barbeque tables.

Noah chillin' before he noticed The Cutest Dog Ever coming toward him.

Here is our old house on Main Street in Oakley last Saturday, followed by a photo from the early 1980s of some sisters and cousins on the same lawn eating a picnic with Uncle Larry.  (I couldn't find the one I wanted of the house itself.  That's the same tree, though.)

What kid wouldn't enjoy a good, dusty cemetery?!  I'm a headstone whisperer - I can find who we're looking for before my parents do. 

I don't know why this photo is grainy, but I still love it.  Banks had been riding in our car and wanted to hold Brian's hand as we walked to the parade.

And now a sampling of the billion pictures I got of this irresistible face:

And now with his adorable Mama:

Speaking of parent-child look-a-likes, here's my Dad with Grandpa Curtis at the Marion Cemetery (they're standing in front of Isaac Lee's headstone on super-hot lava rocks):

One more - the Oakley Pioneer Day Parade is mostly about the horses.  And the water.  Bridget didn't get it.