Fifevergnügen 2012

Fifes from far and wide converged on North Carolina's beautiful Outer Banks earlier this month for our biennial Fifevergnügen celebration. In other words, it was family reunion time! We had a lot of fun and learned a few things too. Here are 7 things we discovered (or rediscovered) while spending time with our family:

1. A little "pir-attitude" goes a long way.

We had a pirate theme for our reunion this year, and while we all had fun joking about bung holes (Seriously, doesn't just saying 'bung hole' make you giggle?) and using pirate slang, no one got into things quite as much as Grandpa. He had a set of false pirate teeth that kept making appearances at the craziest times, like during pictures, and devotionals, and the entire trip to the museum.

2. You can build a kite, but there’s no guarantee it will fly.

One morning we built our own kites. The kids and I have done this a couple of times over the years with varying levels of success. Sometimes the kites have flown really well and other times they haven’t. We took our kites to Jockey’s Ridge State Park thinking that all the wind on the dunes would provide an environment forgiving enough to make up for our lack of kite building skill, but it didn't.



 3. Cousins are cute, but can’t be trusted with valuables.

We all enjoyed getting to know our newest cousins. Emily and Brandon were especially good babysitters, and all the kids quickly learned to keep anything they didn’t want lost, broken, or eaten (like cell-phones or Nintendo games) out of little hands. One of the trip’s most memorable moments was when 1-yr-old Andy pushed his dad’s car keys through the bung hole (there's that word again, hee-hee) of a barrel in the Roanoke Island Museum Gift Shop and the maintenance crew had to be called in to dismantle the whole display in order to recover the keys.



4. Yo-ho, yo-ho--we prefer indoor pluming.

We visited Roanoke Island where we learned about what life was like in the 1600s. All I can say is, I’m so glad I'm not a pirate, or a privateer, or even a colonist! I did enjoy getting the chance to flog Brandon, though. That kid has had it coming for a long time now. (Just kidding)




5. The Wright Brothers had vastly underdeveloped senses of self-preservation.

We visited Wright Brothers Memorial and Museum, and, I must say, until I actually saw them in person, I never gave much thought to how flimsy those first airplanes were. One of my favorite parts of the memorial was the plaque thanking the members of the local life saving station for their unrecognized part in the work. Seriously, that says it all.



6. Taming the ocean is not for the faint of heart.

After a week of boogie boarding, wave jumping, crab catching, and wild ocean kayak rides, I don’t think there was one of us that wasn’t burned, banged, bruised or cut. At one point, after playing in the waves for a while, Bryce told me he wanted to go back to the house and swim in the hot tub. On the walk back he let me know, in all seriousness, that the reason the was going in was because he cut his finger on a shell and he didn’t want to tempt any of the sharks that might be in the area. After all, they can smell a drop of blood a mile away.



7.  Family is the best treasure.

We can't wait until 2014 to do it all again!