You Can Tell The Family Reunion’s Over When

We recently got back from a family reunion in Montana where I spent 10 days hanging with my parents, 4 siblings, 2 siblings-in-law, 2 nieces, one nephew and 2 dogs in one house. It was a blast. However as the week drew to a close, I started noticing signs that it was time to pack it in and head home.

Here are the top 5 ways you can tell the family reunion is over:

1. All of your conversations degenerate into inside jokes, unfinished sentences and quotes from The Princess Bride and Star Wars.

2. You become so overcome with your niece’s cuteness that you start measuring suit-cases, looking for a place where she can comfortably stow away.

3. You come to realize that you’ve consumed every last morsel of food in the Billings area and have gotten almost too fat to fit in your van for the ride home.

4. After several nights with less than 5 hours of sleep because you can’t stand to be parted from all your best friends, you find yourself bursting into tears over an injustice in a card game and storming away from the table like a spoiled 5-year-old.

5. Your own children begin referring to you only as “Auntie Katie.”

So you can see the bangs in this picture, fresh from the religious hair salon. They don’t look their super-awesomest because I was more worried about getting one single picture of the whole family without either of the kids pulling crazy faces than I was about my hair. Alas. The price of motherhood.