Family Matters

My dad had a birthday last month, and my Uncle Frank's is Tuesday. They're both 60 years old. Uncle Frank is the "Crazy Uncle" everyone has, so when he and Aunt Judy decided to come out here (from Florida) to celebrate with my family (his sister and mother), I was happy I'd get to see him again.
Uncle Frank has a daughter about my age (Rachel) who lives in New York, and 2 step-daughters who live in Ohio and Wisconsin. As a surprise for his birthday, all three of them came out to Tucson as well to celebrate with him. Nobody knew about that, not Uncle Frank, not my parents, not even Grandma Betty. What a cool surprise!

When Uncle Frank, Aunt Judy and Rachel lived here, we used to go to Grandma Betty's house all the time for brunch. I always loved that because it was fun to hang out with my cousin and my crazy uncle, and the typical brunch food was some of my favorite: scrambled eggs, bagels and cream cheese. It's been years since we've done that, as we've all grown up and they've moved away. For years when they've come to town I've tried to get them to come to my house for brunch, but instead we always end up going to some restaurant. This year I finally got my family to come to my house for brunch in January when my sister was in town. So this weekend I was hopeful they would come again rather than go to some restaurant... and they did!

It was fun - we had scrambled eggs, bagels, lox, cream cheese, fruit, potatoes, and some pastries and chocolate cake for dessert. I was able to show them all my newly arranged and slightly cleaner house, and my guest house remodeling project in progress.

My cousin Rachel is a professional quality singer, so everyone wanted to hear her sing karaoke - so we played some Karaoke Revolution - which, of course, is not real singing... but they loved it anyway. Only Rachel and I sang anything. Then we played some Guitar Hero, which my other cousin Michelle sometimes plays with her kids (Robin and Michelle are about 10 years older than me and have families and stuff). I'm not terrific at Guitar Hero, but they all wanted to see me play Freebird, and were impressed when I played it on "hard" level (I didn't fail! In fact, I think I could 4-star it without too much more practice...)

I took a few pictures of my family, and this seems like as good a place as any to post them: