Cousins Group Photo, sort of

Every August since moving to Minnesota the cousins have posed for an official photo. I think I'll leave the photography to Neil or Patrick because this is what happened when I tried. Sigh.

Happy Easter from the Colemans!

The pork shoulder is about ready to fall off the bone, so I don't have time to write, but it was a full first Easter in the new house. Although we had opportunities to spend the day with the extended family, we had some things we needed to get done, like find some of the good hiding places for eggs in our new yard and the like.

We took plenty of photos but in brief:

• All dressed up for church -- similar to what we wore to Amelia's second birthday party the day before but different enough that it deserved another photo.
• Easter egg hunt in the backyard. Cate and I banished the kids to the basement for a little while while we put the eggs out in various levels of difficult hiding places.
• Cate crocheted Easter baskets for each of the kids. You can see them in the photos. Elizabeth just said, "I really like my basket, Mom!"
  
• After the kids all found their eggs, they hid eggs for me and Cate to find. One got lost in the shuffle and another accidentally went over the fence for our neighbors to have.
• Pork shoulder has been marinating since yesterday afternoon and has been roasting in the oven since 11 a.m. today. Ready to pull it momentarily, which is why I'm being brief.
• Visited Pa, and there's a photo of him with the kids in the photos link above.
• Lots of chocolate was consumed.
• Hello to all we missed today!
  

And then some other items from today:

After Colleen got dressed this morning, she looked at the mirror in the living room and said, "Ooh, I look good!" And she did. She was twirling -- the dress is definitely made for twirling.

If you get a chance to look really closely at the photos from Amelia's second birthday (also on Facebook) and compare them to the photos from today, you'll see that Robert is missing a tooth. Cate pulled it yesterday afternoon. It had already been knocked looser in a Monopoly accident on Friday afternoon (Robert hit his own face maniacally shaking his dice) and Cate finished it off.

The kids gave a name to each of the 24 or so plastic eggs we got for hiding. So sorry that Jose didn't get to fulfill his Easter destiny of being hidden and then found. The kids were playing with him in the basement and he never got out.

Elizabeth: "We ate awesome cake that Mom made yesterday. There!"

Some of the eggs in today's hunt didn't have rewards, but challenges. I think Elizabeth was a little confused when she opened an egg that said, "Hop on one foot for a minute." She was not allowed to continue egg hunting until the minute was up. Colleen found one that said, "Do five jumping jacks," and another that said "Go kiss Daddy." I was surprised when she came tearing around the house and grabbed me around the leg and kissed me. Elizabeth also found one that said, simply, "This is a plastic egg."

We got a chance to test out just a few of the great hiding places in our yard. Elizabeth's egg was hidden on the roof of the garage, for example. Robert's was hidden out of his reach in a tree. I buried one halfway in a planter box and another underneath the chin of a decorative rabbit in the front yard. Each of the kids had one with his or her name on it and a special treat, then they were competing for the rest of the eggs.

The forsythia are in full bloom at Nonna and Da's, as well as the pussy willows.

An Easter Story

At the breakfast table, Colleen tells a story to Amelia ---

Once upon a time in a galaxy far away, Jesus was coming to town and everybody was there saying "Yay! Yay! You rock!" and Jesus was tired so they gave him a donkey. He was riding the donkey and there were kids there and they said "Hoshana!" And Jesus said "I'm the King of Peace!" Then they had dinner and Jesus got in trouble with the police and they arrested him and threw him in jail. And they lived happily ever after - except then he died. But that's okay because he came back on Easter morning. But then he went away again. It's all very confusing. The End.

Amelia clapped and said "Yay! Yay!"

It was a happy holiday

I had planned about waxing much more poetic about Thanksgiving but time never really developed for me to do that. So I'll just scale it back and say we had a wonderful time at our first Thanksgiving in Minneapolis since 2003. I had grown to accept turkey day with Cate's family in Pennsylvania, and at times possibly even enjoyed it, but it just wasn't the same.

Mom entertained 33 people, Neil made great gravy, the kids had a great time with their cousins and kids of family friends and the like. I don't remember specifics of getting the food on the table from previous years but it seemed like with three grown sons things got a lot easier.

Mom may disagree, who knows.

Plus, we survived a mix of family that could well have been fraught with disaster.

Turkey, mashed potatoes, two types of gravy, stuffing, Mama Stamberg's cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, wild rice, more pies than you could shake a fork at ... and a professional, or at least experienced meat carver. (Bob, at right, who is not related. Nor is mom's friend Nancy.)

There were two kids' tables, delineated by age, with the littlest ones by themselves. Somehow that didn't turn out to be a disaster. Elizabeth got to sit with cousin Matt's two younger kids, who are in the 10 and 12 range, and a neighbor who is her age as well. I'm sure that was an interesting conversation. The photo above shows only the grown-up table.

Let's cook, and eat shrimp!

MINNEAPOLIS -- Coleman family insiders were stunned Sunday night when Cate Coleman ate shrimp, for reportedly the first time in her life.

Coleman, 35, partook of the seafood dish as part of a Coleman family outing to Let's Cook, a store near downtown Minneapolis that offers cooking classes and events for groups. Mom volunteers there for other people's classes and brought the group of family adults down for a private class, focused on handmade pasta.

The shrimp was an hors d'oeuvre.

"Once I got past what it looked like, I tried it and it actually tasted good," she explained later in the evening.

Cate has actually cooked shrimp before, for me, as I was the only one in the family who would eat it. But she has often expressed a desire to not be able to recognize her food when it's on her plate, if you know what I mean, and a cooked shrimp is shaped a lot like the thing it used to be.

During the evening, she also tried the spinach filling for tortellini. And there were other things but I don't remember what she tasted at the table.

It was a fun evening, kneading dough, cutting it into strips and forming it into shapes, or tortellini, or ravioli ... man, getting hungry just thinking about it again. The chef had some incredible sauces to serve with the various pasta. Cate did draw the plain pasta, while other Colemans made tomato-flavored pasta and spinach pasta, but it was neat to knead the dough and roll it out, etc.

Plus, it was just nice to get out without the kids.

More photos on my Facebook page.

Happy anniversary, mom and dad

Mom and Dad celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary Sunday afternoon by inviting the whole parish over to hear a local folk duo. So Neal and Leandra played and the children drunk lemonade and about a hundred people came out to listen, on a beautiful day, inside. (The adults had champagne.)

In all, a great idea. We were asked to save the date back when they sent out their Christmas cards in February. And it turns out we were here a few weeks ahead of schedule.

Mom and Dad spoke briefly before the concert. Somehow Dad kept his prepared remarks below 20 minutes, Cate was very impressed. Mom related a story: she was talking to her mom one day about a year after they were married and she said she couldn't imagine being together for 35 or 40 years. And Nanny said, "the first five years take forever. And then the next 35 just fly by."

I could manage to agree with that assessment. Cate, sitting at the laptop next to me, says she is still waiting for the flying. "I was promised flying by!"

Below, Dad is wearing The Wedding Coat, which he wore to many summer weddings in the ... '70s, I would assume from the looks of it ... and became part of the family lore. He's recently been able to wear it again. (I added this later, ran out of juice last night, both in the brain and the laptop.)

Many people that I hadn't seen in years, obviously. The Schroeders (John and Dana) from a few blocks down the street jokingly took some credit for my career in journalism, but I told them they were definitely entitled to some of it. They ran a newspaper in rural Minnesota in the '80s and came to our neighborhood when I was in grade school. They helped St. Thomas put together a student newspaper and I was the photographer. (That was the only way I wanted to be involved in journalism, yet I ended up on the word side in college.)

Ann Marie Kotre, who was my parents' realtor in Michigan, was in town. Didn't recognize her, of course, but remembered seeing one of her sons play Tony in West Side Story. Always wanted to play that part, but couldn't dance well enough or sing low enough.

Our cousin Kelly was in from out of town, as well as friend of the family/godmother to Colleen Jennifer. And the family repaired to the family domicile afterward for dinner.

Great time had by all.

I just wrapped up a big D3football.com project, so this is my first chance on the blog in a while. Thanks for your patience. More photos on my Facebook page.

Generation next

The cousin crew got together last night, for the most part, with my cousin Rachel in town with her four boys. (Soon to be five!)

The Lahr cousins were absent, but almost all of the second cousins were there. We only lacked Amelia, who apparently has a more important social calendar. Grand times were had, not necessarily including this group portrait. This is one of the images that didn't include Connor doing the rabbit ears on one of his cousins, Daniel crying, and has Grace actually in the photo. (Alexander facing the camera never quite happened.)

Elizabeth is the oldest of this group, and always will be, of course, as she is a month older than Grant. Grant at 10-1/2 is five feet tall (a few inches short of his mom!) and Elizabeth is about 4-9. Robert and Parker are about a year apart.

Mary Catherine Coleman's great-grandchildren, from left to right, if I remember correctly: Connor Reed, Daniel Reed, Parker Linder, Colleen Coleman, Elizabeth Coleman, Michael Reed, Alexander John, Robert Coleman, Augustine Linder, Grant Linder, Matthias Linder, Grace John.

As I commented to Rachel, now I have to put some effort into remembering which Reed kid is which. Before, seeing them every couple of years, they would change so much in between visits that it wasn't worth trying to retain. The Reeds are 9, 7, and 5. Rachel and the boys are heading up to Duluth for the Hon family reunion and eventually have a 25-hour drive back to New Hampshire next week.

Mom said something to Elizabeth and a couple of the others about winning the prize for attentiveness. Predictably, Elizabeth asked what the prize was, and I told her that when she and others look at these photos in 2047 she can gloat about how attentive she was. Colleen and Grant were good photo subjects as well. And I can bet that Amelia's absence will cause some head-scratching years from now. (Was she born yet? Wasn't that after we moved to Minnesota? Did we still have the blue car? Robert, we never had a BLUE car!)