Family For The Holidays

I should have written this entry a week ago but didn’t. Kristi’s been slowly recovering from back troubles, I’m still coughing crap up from a cold I had a few weeks back, and we came back from Thanksgiving week to the usual client work routine and deadlines. Each day we both said, should write it today, I’ll do it tomorrow, and it doesn’t get done. Blog updates are a little like laundry that way, which probably explains why we have, like, three loads of dirty clothes currently backed up and waiting for a round in the Whirlpool of Goodness.

Usually I’d save the photos for the end, but screw that. Here you go.

After seven years in Modesto, my family has finally landed! That’s Kristi and I at the back. From left to right, it’s my brother Chris, aunt Marty, my grandma, and my uncle Leo. We took this photo at the end of Thanksgiving Day at Kristi’s parents’ house, after a long day of good food, reminiscing and being goofy.

This visit was a long time coming. We reached out to our Missouri family several years ago, and since then our relationships have grown as we’ve all become good friends as well as family. Kristi and I had gone to visit them a couple years ago in Kansas City, but this was their first visit to California. So it was a pretty exciting week all the way around for us all. None of them had seen Chris in person for around 25 years.

Also, Aunt Marty had never seen the ocean before – something that boggles my mind, having grown up in Florida. The ocean and beach are just normal parts of life, like blue sky and green grass. After a while you stop thinking about it altogether, you take it for granted.

And then you visit Monterey for the first time and think, oh yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty good.

That was Day Two. We all tooled over to coast, got our collective fill of the gorgeous Northern California seashore, and then had some rocking seafood at our favorite place (though Leo had ribs – okay, so we didn’t know he had a shellfish allergy!). Monterey is beautiful at any time, but the Pacific there is particularly special at night.

And that takes us to the big day. Here’s what turkey for 34 people looks like on the Don Jepson family grill:

The day itself was a lot of fun. This was really the first time Kristi’s family and mine truly have intermingled. Chris has been here several times, but this felt much more like a proper family introduction. One thing I’ve come to truly love about our family here (it’s taken me a number of years to stop calling them “Kristi’s family”, old habit from WAY back) is that you can get forty people together in one house and everyone still likes each other. As Kristi’s cousin Andy, a pastor from San Diego who performed our wedding in 2008, said over dinner, we all tend to bring out the best in each other. And I’ve come to like that a lot. It was an honor and a pleasure to help bring our families together.

Leo played with our three-year-old nephew Ryan quite a bit (Chris has some great photos), and we’re pretty sure that my uncle at this point is sort of the missing Jepson brother. Without a doubt, he and my father in law have both found new best buddies, sharing as they do passions for fly fishing, grilling and all things midwest manly.

We really enjoyed the hell out of this, and are so glad they could all make it out here. We can’t wait to visit with them again, whether that is here (there’s some talk about next spring/summer, and spending some time at the mountain cabin doing from real California fishing) or us trekking back to Missouri again. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we like each other a lot, and have family relationships we can rely on.

Hope you can say the same. Happy belated Thanksgiving!