Before I tell you about my run-in with a vicious gopher, I first must say that we had a lovely Easter. We met up with my Sister-in-Law and her family for a yummy brunch. It was one of those fancy buffets, and I wanted to enjoy it, so I started Annie off with the dessert. It was the best idea I’ve had in months – she sat there and slowly destroyed a plate of tiramisu while I made several trips to the buffet without incident. After we ate, we let the kids work off their sugar by running around the lake.

none of them are happy about this picture

Making them pose for a picture was a bad idea.

Spencer tells the girls all about the ducks

The lake had ducks, and Spencer told us all about what kind of ducks they were, what they ate, and where they originated from (I retained…none of this information).

come HERE duckies!
come HERE duckies!

friends

They ran faster than any of us expected.

danny and michaela

michaela and annie

After brunch, we went to my parents’ house, where we tried to get Annie to hunt for eggs. It took her a loooooong time to want to find them – she was afraid the Easter Bunny was going to show up, and she is still terrified of him. She eventually warmed up to the idea of hunting for eggs, after much coddling and the discovery that the eggs had presents in them.

hunting

hunting

loves the little things

It’s been gorgeous weather here lately, so we (me, Mike, Annie, my brother, his boyfriend Sebastian, my cousin Leah, and her boyfriend Ted) all went swimming in my parents’ pool after dinner. Most of the group was in the warmer spa, but Annie, Mike, Ted, and I were all still in the pool. I was telling some story when suddenly Leah SCREAMED, “OH MY GOD THERE IS A RAT COMING FOR YOU.”

Now. I was in the middle of the pool, and last time I checked, rats don’t usually enjoy evening swims. But I didn’t question it, I merely yelped and started swimming toward everyone else, pulling Annie with me. When I felt I’d traveled a safe distance, I turned around, expecting to see them all laughing at Leah’s hilarious prank…except there it was…a freaking rodent…swimming towards me. I yelled for my dad, who ran out of the house and fished it out with a pool net. He then looked at us all witheringly and said, “That wasn’t a rat, it was a gopher.” Oh sorry, my bad.

Leah and Sebastian were laughing. “It seriously was less than a foot from you when I saw it,” Leah told me. If a freaking GOPHER had swam up on me in the freaking pool and actually touched me, the entire world would have heard my scream. Talk about things you are not expecting to happen to you ever, let alone in a pool.

Mike drew you all a picture so you can see just how close and large and clearly rabid the gopher was.

gopher attack, a diagram
I look so pretty!

I asked Mike what he was thinking when he saw the gopher, and he said, “The first thing I thought was that these things always seem to happen to you.” I don’t know how to respond to that.