Warning! Lots of photos in this post!

On Friday, Jason and I high-tailed it out of the "big city" (all my relatives call it that, "so, how are things in the big city?" and on like that...) and drove South to Connecticut. My parents are originally from Somers, CT and I spent a lot of time there when I was little visiting my Grandparents and family friends. On Friday night and into Saturday the "girls" put together a scrapbook for my Grandmother and Grandfather for their surprise 50th Anniversary party which included pages about the children and grandchildren. We stayed up late on Friday and got up early on Saturday to work on the scrapbook and let me tell you, my Mom and Aunt Tina are crazy scrapbooking machines! They didn't find it difficult at all to finish an entire scrapbook in less than 24 hours. And, in addition to that, they needed to take a trip to AC Moore on Saturday to get more page protectors because they ended up making TOO MANY pages for the scrapbook! The boys even helped out with the creation of the pages (kinda, sorta, almost... haha. Really, they did help, but they were skeptical as well.) Also, check out the MESS we made in Tina's kitchen! You just can't scrapbook with 5 girls and not make a mess!

In the same town that my Aunt lives in is an airport where a family friend works. He's an instructor for tandem skydivers. Yes, he jumps out of planes... many times in one weekend, with people strapped to the front of him! It was SO COOL to get to watch him take people up... When we were there he recorded his 7,597th skydive, and over 3,000 of those were tandem jumps. Needless to say, Erin and I (and Jason too, although he will say he was dragged into it!) are now determined to go skydiving together! If anyone wants to join us, let us know. (Check out the website here and photos of Mike tandem jumping here. Really... how cool is that? I think that's him on the home page of the website too! And for those of you who don't usually click on the links in my blog, please do so today, just for today, then you can ignore my effort to expand the blogging experience and go back to ignoring my links! Seriously, click now!)

So, after watching a friend of ours jump out of a plane a few times we headed back to Tina's to finish preparing for the surprise 50th Anniversary party! I made this edible arrangement for the party (with Audrey's and Mom's help!) and I think it turned out pretty good! Either way, it was good to eat!

Some more photos from the party:

Should I be worried? Haha...

I swear I have more pictures of Erin and Jason than I do of me and Jason! They are cute though... :-)

My Grandmother was VERY surprised and VERY emotional the whole day! I'm so glad they were happy that we were all together!

The story: From left to right are my cousins Audrey and Christopher and my Grandmother. This is the "big" gift and, of course, Christopher wanted to help open it. He tore off the tiniest bit of wrapping paper and promptly yelled "It's a laptop!" At which time everyone busted out laughing! This is why Audrey has her hand over his mouth... he essentially "spilled the beans!"

We also got a chance to go to lunch at my Dad's parent's house... I took this photo of a butterfly on my Grandmother's "butterfly bushes" in her garden. There were about six of these and they were about as big as monarchs... so cool. I want some butterfly bushes now! I suppose I need a yard first... hmm...

And finally, here are the scrapbook pages I made for the scrapbook (in addition to the two I already posted a while back.) The last one, which is a two-page spread, was created by my sister. I had to take a picture of it because I loved the stripes and the amount of photos she was able to get on the pages! (I really want photos of all the pages, but I didn't have time to do that.)

This is my favorite out of the pages I completed this weekend... I'm not usually a fan on yellow, but I really like how this layout turned out. (I wasn't sure if Erin would mind if I posted baby pictures of her butt online, so I added the censored bar just to be sure. Hee hee.)

By Erin (how cute is that?):