That's who slept in our house on Saturday night.
Every year my group of very long time friends gets together for a holiday party. Last year we started having it in January since there are so many other things to do in December. We hosted the party this year and since Laura and Chelsea were both coming from Tucson we made arrangements for everybody to spend the night. Michael, Elliott and I were in the king bed in our room, Josh and Laura were in the queen bed in the guest room, Sam was in the pack n play with them, Sara was in 1 twin and Spencer was in the other in Elliott's room, Chelsea and Mike were in the double bed in Spencer's room and Zac and Lilly shared the pull out couch in the living room. Ginger slept on the couch in the family room.
But before bed, we partied!
We forced all of the kids outside to play when everyone arrived in the afternoon.
I took this picture of Elliott and Sam through the kitchen window.
Five of the six kids. Elliott was in the play house.
We do a gift exchange every year. We always draw names for the kids.
The adults we do a little differently. Everybody brings a gift (that cost a certain amount), we draw numbers and go in order of the numbers. You pick a gift to take, but anybody going after you can steal your gift. I think it's called a Yankee Swap or White Elephant.
The adult gifts.
Elliott was excited.
I got all of our gifts, kid and adult, at Hobby Lobby this year. I got a smoking deal on the adult gifts. Everything was 66% off.
This is what Michael and I contributed this year:
Gift #1
(There was also a jar of salsa)
Gift #2
(It's a taco stand. There was a jar of salsa with this one too.)
Michael had #1. He got a vegetable chopper from Chelsea and Mike. Josh was #2. He got the taco stand. Laura was #3. She got a pizza stone from Chelsea and Mike. I was #4. I got a bottle of wine from Laura and Josh. Chelsea was #5. She stole my wine. Then I had to pick from the remaining gifts or steal from somebody else. I really wanted the taco stand but thought it was bad form to take something that you contributed......until everyone insisted it wasn't. So, I stole the taco stand from Josh. Then Josh stole the wine (that he brought) from Chelsea. So Chelsea picked a new gift and got a Starbucks gift card from Laura and Josh. Mike was #6. He stole the chopper (that he brought) from Michael. So Michael picked the last gift. Which was the plate, bowl and salsa we gave.
Ha Ha Hahahahahahahahahahaha!
Basically the only people that exchanged gifts were Chelsea and Laura. Michael, Josh, Mike and I all got something that we brought......and we were all pretty happy about it!
I joked that next year we should just buy a gift for ourselves and bring it to the party to show everyone.
After the gift giving we had dinner.
Make your own pasta bar!
Josh photo bombing
The big kid table
We had leftover dinosaur masks and hats for all the kids. We broke them out after dinner.
The kids went to bed soon after dinner and the adults stayed up until the wee hours of the night.......but there are no pictures. And apparently there are no pictures of Mike and Chelsea at all. Well, there was one, but it's not blog friendly (ha, ha).
We also all went out to breakfast the next morning, but taking 6 kids to breakfast is kind of chaotic, even with 6 adults, so I didn't even take my camera out of my purse.
In the aftermath of the party I realized I was pretty delighted with the dishes I bought and since they were so cheap I wanted more. Elliott and I went back to Hobby Lobby on Monday morning. I was prepared that everything would be gone after the weekend, but there was plenty left!
I bought 3 more serving pieces.
Now we have enough for a fun-filled Mexican fiesta. And it just so happens that we are having John and Maryellen over for just such a party in February.
Hooray!
3 comments:
I've got to catch up on this blog!!! now that I am off of Facebook I am so out of the dang loop!!
So we do a similar gift exchange every year with Eddie's family, but we call it "Dirty Santa." It can get pretty dirty with everyone stealing the favorite gifts from one another. We limit the number of times a gift can be stolen to 3 so the 3rd person knows they get to keep it. Ha! I actually like that almost everyone in your group just wanted and took back their own gifts. That's a great way to insure you get what you want. I actually brought gifts this year that I wouldn't mind having myself and thought I could get one of them. Then, we changed our game to one where we have to move the gifts around a circle to the reading of special Christmas story so we ended up with whatever we were holding at the end. Sigh. I don't think many people were satisfied with the outcome as you could tell from my post where Eddie's Uncle got the really girly apron I brought. Ha!
I have a different version of the game we did this year....it's so great. Remind me to tell you about it.
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