I MUSTACHE you, how do we look? Part 2

Sorry for the delay, but I had to wait until the pictures arrived (thanks Aunt Lori for the CD!) before I could post.

 

After touring the exquisite Greenbrier Resort we headed back to my Aunt's house for her next surprise, a party that we left the men in charge of! Yes, we are brave in our family and we left the men to decorate the house and lay out all of the pre-prepared food. They did a great job!!! We went with a classy black & white theme and had a ton of "over the hill" types of posters scattered around. The food was amazing (good job Rach!) and we had our favorite white chocolate/raspberry creme cake made by Emily, the most amazing cake maker in WV (we basically only have family celebrations so we can have her cake!). Overall, close to 40 ppl were there to celebrate Aunt Lori which is great b/c she is one of those women that just gives and gives and gives and we all appreciate and love her so much but she doesn't get the appreciation she truly deserves! For fun, my sister made a photobooth backdrop (yep, she looked up a how to online, constructed a PVC frame, and sewed a background with her new sewing machine I gave her for Christmas) and printed out lots of fun props which we taped to skinny dowel rods and we asked our cousins to bring some hats, etc for more fun! Of course, everyone was supplied with a mustache and it's amazing how good they look on some of us women.

 

Uncle Greg with his incredibly young looking 50 y/o birthday girl!

Aunt Denise & Uncle Dave

Dad had to give it a try too!

Can you tell they are related?

Kraft family at our best!

the Queen and King of fun!

you better watch out Mister!

my grandparents are biker babes!

Aunt Lori and her girls

some of Em's wonderful props

the girl cousins! 

Some of the best moments of the night happened in that photobooth. We saw a really fun side of our Aunt Denise and Uncle Dave come out when they dressed up as a Chinese couple. Every time Uncle Dave put his hands together to bow he made this funny "hmmm" sound. Do Chinese ppl make that sound when they bow? Haha. They were laughing so hard we could barely get a decent picture. He also did a studly cowboy pose for us, not expecting that. My grandparents also were hilarious! Someone dressed them up like bikers and Granny was a hoot as she revved her engine! They were such good sports, and quite photogenic for their age.

 

We had such a great time, and I'm so glad that as I'm getting older I'm appreciate more and more my wonderful and quirky family. I hope you all have a reason to host a mustache party sometime or at least have a photobooth of some sort b/c it really does bring out the best in ppl, and by best, I mean the fun!

On Sunday morning the sister and I headed back to Louisville just in time to go to the 5pm service at Sojourn. It's funny that I've now visited several times over the years I feel really comfortable there and have made friends with some locals. Afterwards we headed over to Blake and Jenelle's for dinner. They are on a big P90x kick and made us the most delicious black bean & sweet potatoe wraps ever (from the P90x cookbook)---oh and the granola/oatmeal/blueberry dessert was out of this world. I aspire to be half as good of a cook as they are! We enjoyed a relaxing evening together, celebrating Blake's new EMT job, loving on Penny & Lucy (their adorable Pomeranians), and sipping wine by the fireplace while Blake played guitar for us.

 

It was hard to believe that while we were having fun in WV with the fam so many ppl close to the Louisville area and even a part of the Sojourn family were affected by the tornados. Em had received several heartbreaking emails about parents looking for their children whose daycare had been destroyed, and about houses that were blown away and parents either being trapped or greatly injured trying to search for their children in the rubble. This is probably the closest I'd ever been to a nature related tragedy. I wish we would have been able to make it back sooner from WV so we could have gone with Em's community group to IN to help with some outreach, but I'm thankful for the experience of just the proximetry to disaster which opened my eyes to how precious life is outside of the hospital. Sometimes I forget that bad things can happen out there, ya know, "the real world" and that I don't always see the worst of it here, within my hospital walls.