My family is a week late celebrating Father’s Day this year because Holly and I were in China last week when Father’s Day actually was.  I suppose it’s the height of narcissism when you forget when a holiday is in fact, because that’s not when *we* are celebrating it! LOL At any rate, it completely slipped my mind last week for Picture of the Week, so here I am with my Father’s Day post… a week late also.  🙂  We’ll just call it a celebration of family, how’s that?

You may recall that last year my family decided to name our annual family vacation “Camp Manitou”, after the camp in Herman Wouk’s City Boy.  The decision was made, in part, because my niece Sophia has us all reading books over the course of the week at the beach.  It’s a particular passion of her’s to get people reading, and she prides herself in selecting books she thinks each person will enjoy (she somehow got me reading Harry Potter this year, even after I insisted I had already seen the movies and therefore didn’t need to read the books).  This year, however, I think she realized her success… and that perhaps she’d been a little too successful.  We typically we watch a movie each night after dinner, however this year, we were all enjoying our books so much, we decided to forego the movies and just read our books together.  At one point she announced that maybe what she should do is focus on getting us to all watch TV together instead of reading… which we all chuckled at, and then went back to reading our books.

With all the busyness of life, I greatly value this one week a year where we all spend time together.  I can think of no better gift from my parents to the rest of us.  Thanks mom and dad!

–Dan Thompson

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