A Family Gathering – St. Louis Missouri

Our son, his wife Amy and our 2 grandsons, David II and Emmett Lee recently moved from Cleveland Ohio to Omaha Nebraska.  The bad news is that they’ve moved further away but the good news is that Laurie’s immediate family live in St. Louis Missouri…which is right en-route on the fastest way to drive to Omaha from East Tennessee. 

So…when we go to visit family, we may be gone a bit longer, but whenever we drive, we will have a chance to spend some time with our families in both cities!

(Warning… This is a family orientated posting and if photos of other people’s family tend to put you to sleep, I’ll post another item to my blog site in just 2 days!)

We arrived in the St. Louis area in mid-afternoon… Our first goal was to visit Laurie’s Aunt Lois.  She’ll be 101 years old in January and she still regularly wins at various card games.  She also has a better memory, long or short term, than either Laurie or me!  (Laurie took this ‘selfie’of the three of us.)

Following our visit with Aunt Lois, we headed off to a family dinner that Laurie and her sister Bonnie set up.  This is Laurie with her niece Kasey (Bonnie and Bill's daughter)…at the restaurant.  

  

Laurie’s sister Bonnie knew the manager of a very popular local restaurant on the south side of St. Louis named Joey B’s Food and Drink and got reservations for our group.  We put the word out to the extended family and invited everyone to a family gathering…

(I’ll post information about Joey B’s Restaurant and the food separately)

 

It’s a good thing that we had reservations at Joey B’s!  The restaurant was extremely busy but we were good to go… This photo shows part of our family group.  We start out on the left with the 3 girls…Regan, Cate and Abby.  Then we have Katie and her mother Linda…who is Laurie’s 2^nd cousin) Next are Rose and Johnny, Katie’s grandparents.  Bob is to the right of the photo… He’s the grandfather of the 3 girls across the table.  Unfortunately we missed getting a photo of his wife/Laurie’s sister Karole.  Sorry Karole! Where did you go?

This photo was taken by Laurie down at the other end of the table… From the left, there is yours truly, next is Bonnie, then her granddaughter Avery, Bonnie’s husband Bill, granddaughter Delaney, and finally parents Kevin and Kasey. 

This is Laurie’s sister Glenda with her husband Ken… After living in their home for many, many years, they’d just moved into a retirement community.  Not only have they shed all of the maintenance and other miscellaneous pains of home ownership, but their former home was purchased by one of their 5 grandsons, Stewart and his wife Sarah!  They have two young sons, Isaac and Liam...so the house stays in the family!

This is Tanya, Laurie's niece and her boyfriend Van.  Tanya has 2 children who couldn’t attend, Taylor and Alexander.  Tanya also has 2 sisters, Tammy and Tracy and their father is Laurie’s brother, Bobby.

Johnny is at the left.  He's one of Laurie’s cousins…actually one of Aunt Lois’s 3 sons, which also happens to be Laurie, Bonnie, Karole, Glenda and Bob's "double cousins".  Doris (Laurie, Bonnie, Karole,Glenda and Bob's mother) and Lois (son's Johnny, Alan and Jim) are sisters and they married Robert and John who are brothers!  Yes...very interesting …and Johnny is sitting next to John, niece Judy’s husband.  Aunt Lois’ other sons were unable to join us for this gathering. 

This is Judy in a “Thinker’s” pose… She’s the niece who’s married to John in the previous photo… She and John have 3 children and 2 grandchilden as well!

Here’s another photo of Laurie’s niece Kasey with her husband, Kevin.  Her brother Kyle, his wife Melissa and their 2 sons were unable to attend this gathering as they live out in central Missouri and it was a weeknight…

This is another photo of Laurie’s youngest sister Bonnie and her husband Bill.  They are a pair of doting grandparents, that’s for sure!

This is Tammy… She’s married to Marc, one of Laurie’s nephews and one of Karole's 3 sons.  Marc was out of town at a corporate conference.  He’s in the retail business and some of his stores are located up in the Ferguson Missouri area…which as you know was recently been hit with racial strife. (Sorry for the blurry photo!)

  

These are Tammy and Marc’s daughters… Cate is the youngest, Regan is next and Abby, the tallest, is the oldest.  Karole, another of Laurie’s sisters, and her husband Bob are the girls’ grandparents.

The youngest generation was well represented at our family gathering… Avery and Delaney ended up sitting with the other 3 youngsters at a kid’s table when our group ended up growing larger than expected.

This is another photo of Katie and her mom Linda… Katie’s sister Sarah was unable to join us for dinner, as was Linda's husband Greg.

All in all, by my count, 24 of Laurie’s family members, including in-laws, managed to join us for this work night/week night family gathering.  Not bad! Plus, there was a storm we all had to contend with!   If everyone from family that lives in the St. Louis area had been able to attend this little soiree, we would have needed a larger facility!  The total would have been at least 40!  We all agreed that it was a fun time and we should all do it again!

We hope that the family and any patient visitors to my blog site enjoyed the photos.  Just click on one if you want to enlarge it…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave (and Laurie)