Day 7 Report

The final day of Cousin Camp dawned at approximately dawn. The cooking and cleanup work began soon after. The mission: Get the house ready for the mob of people arriving at 11:00 for Jordan’s birthday party. The kids threw everything into the effort (well, mostly).

I personally did not get up until some time after dawn, so I missed some of the cooking, cleanup, and decoration work. But I did get to vacuum and cleanup the back porch.

People began arriving at 11:00, and they just kept on arriving. This day would test the very foundations of our house, as it had never before contained so many people. We soon discovered that there are quite a number of bottlenecks in the traffic pattern of our house layout. (At least I did.) We also discovered that leaving the back door open to facilitate easier entry and egress resulted in some uninvited guests: the Flies. Fortunately, I am a skilled Fly Hunter from my days in Powhatan, so I have been thinning their population quite skillfully.

Cynthia’s brother Greg cooked some awesome steaks on two grills, other people brought awesome food, Cynthia cooked awesome food, Samantha ground up some awesome ice cream in the ice cream makers (amazingly avoiding a fatal electrocution from the ice makers sitting in puddles of water next to the electrical outlet). Basically, the food rocked.

Well, except for the birthday cake from a certain pastry shop which shall remain nameless. Let’s just call them, the “Westhampton Bakery.” These are the people that made our wedding cake, which rocked, so we were a bit perplexed about the stunning mediocrity of the birthday cake, which wasn’t even ready when Cynthia went to pick it up.

Fiona did not particularly enjoy the event because she was locked in her cat carrier in a back room, yowling in misery. Apparently Aunt Barbara is terrified of cats because of a childhood cat-related trauma or something. (Really.)

After we ate and attempted to play a game roughly resembling volleyball without any rules, Jordan got a bunch of cool presents, including one from her grandmother wrapped in a Victoria’s Secret gift bag. Yes, you read that right. Strangely, nobody found this particularly odd.

After all this, the kids packed up the majority of their stuff and went back to their respective homes. Cynthia was sad, and I tried to pretend to be sad, too. Just kidding! Really. No, stop laughing, I mean it. Truthfully I was just getting used to the kids being here, and the place seemed pretty empty last night.

Tristan was pretty sad too, since he had to go back to sleeping on the floor.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled lives.

Pictures from Cousin Camp