Family Dinner

Today we had a wonderful family dinner at our house.  Nephew Lee is here from Chicago for a long weekend.  We have done no tourist things.  We  just talked and laughed. Lee was happy to just hang out.

We have eaten good eats.  It has been three years since Lee has been here.  We have caught up on what’s going on with each other.  We have cooked, we have drunk good wines, we ate out and had fabulous food.  And today we had a family get together.

Lee, our son Erik, and another nephew Tres had not been together in about 15 years.  Each one had seen one of the cousins through the years, but never the three together.  Today they reunited.

Tres is the only one with children.  We enjoyed the little ones.   We laughed at how busy the year and a half  old was.  This child never slowed down.  The 4 year old and 8 year old played, watched a movie, and helped keep watch over their baby sister. It was a true family gathering.

But it was all about the cousins.  They talked about who had been hurt worst while visiting their Grandmother and Papaw Jack.  Erik may have won with a broken leg from an aerator running over him.  There were falls from the pool slide.  A cousin who wasn’t here won for the highest fall from the slide.  They all agreed Lee’s older sister Lisa was mean and bossy to the little boys. ( sorry Lisa, I don’t remember that. But they told it as they remember it.)  We do all remember about big sisters.

For today’s dinner, Marty and I made smoked ribs and chicken with my famous barbeque sauce.  I also made potato salad (my mother’s recipe), cole slaw, Southern green beans, Benedictine, drunken puppies (little cocktail franks and Bourbon is involved), Bloody Marys,  and a Brownie cake.  It was a lovely meal if I do say so myself.

The cousins had a good visit. They laughed, they talked, they had fun.   It was fun for me to look at them and see the family mouth, nose, mannerisms.  Each man looks like my family, pure Triplett.(Saying man is weird, these are the little boys I diapered, played with, held in my arms.)

Yet when with the other half of their families you see that blood line.  Erik looks pure Appel with his Dad’s family.  Tres looks so much like his Mother’s family.  And Lee, I see his Dad, Leland.

Tomorrow Lee flies back to Chicago.  We will miss him.  We have had such a good visit.  He promises to come back to see us.  And maybe someday we can go visit him.