Beat the Winter Blues Bash

This past week was spent getting ready for our "Beat the Winter Blues Bash." I had quite a few things I wanted to cook/bake, some decorating and of course cleaning to do so I spaced it out through the week and it wasn't that bad. But first a have a couple pictures of Lincoln in the high chair. He has been eating baby food for a while now and he takes it pretty well. The only thing he really doesn't like so far are green beans. He does like sweet peas though so I just use that for his green veggie. Ellie sometimes joins us in the dining room for lunch now and this day the sun was really shining in and showing off Lincoln's red hair.

Thursday we didn't have small group and so we took some time off to go to a ball game. It wasn't as crowded since it was a weekday and Jackson and Ellie had a great time running around with their friend Kiersten. Then Mary and Lauren stopped by on Friday and took Ellie with them to run some errands and the girls convinced Mary to take them out to the ranch to continue their play time. I decided to shovel our driveway because we had several inches of snow and we were having Tom and Mary in for dinner. I got it about halfway done when our new neighbor across the street (whom I haven't met yet since they moved in the middle of our cold winter) came out with his lawn mower with snow plow attached. He first went to help out our neighbor Melissa who was also out shoveling her driveway and finished hers and then came and finished ours. It was very nice of him. His wife had arrived home not too long before this and she probably took pity on us and told her husband to get outside and help us. What was funny was a little while after he started helping us my other neighbor to the north of us came out and started shoveling her driveway. She was totally hoping he would come help her too and he did. So Tom, Mary and Lauren brought Ellie home and we ordered some pizza for dinner. The girls played dress up and Lincoln showed off for his grandparents.

Then Saturday Andrew took Jackson and Ellie out to the ranch again and I worked most of the day prepping for the party. Lincoln must have realized he wasn't getting much attention so he decided he would get back at me by not napping. But there was maybe an hour there where all was quite and I just vegged out a little before getting back to work. My parents and Caroline came over before the party started and helped set everything out. They were very helpful. There was a lot to be done last minute but we got it all put out just in time. Some of my family wanted to see pictures, so here are some of the decorations.

The twigs and grass were sprayed with white spraypaint and had glitter on them-kind of hard to tell in this picture. And here is the food. This is just what I did (my mom did a couple of dips too) and some of the guests brought stuff too so we had a lot of food. I realized now that I forgot to take a picture of the hot chocolate bar but it was cute. We had the hot chocolate and then marshmallows, sprinkles, chopped candy, vanilla syrup and pirouette cookies as stirrers. I made some labels for all the containers and had some fun ribbon on them. Also it was Grace LaBeth's 4th birthday, so I made a sign for one of the cupcakes for her. For appetizers we had fruit and veggies and dip, buffalo chicken dip, "to die for" dip, shrimp, quiches, sausage and cheese wontons, stuffed pizza rolls and the favorite pinapple wrapped in brown sugar bacon. For dessert there were apple streusel bars, chocolate cake cookie sandwiches, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate scotcharoos, and cupcakes with white chocolate snowflakes.

We ended up having around 40 people here including all the kiddos. I have no idea what the kids did but I think they had fun. They went between the basement playing in the playroom, with the video games and doing a little craft I had set out and then they would head upstairs to the bonus room and play on the teeter totter and wrestle around. Jackson ended the night by wrestling two seven-year-olds a boy and a girl. He says he won but I never heard what the other two thought. As far as the adults, I had a couple of games to play but everyone just ended up setting around and talking which is fine by me. I thought it was a succesful night and I hope everyone had a good time. The clean-up was not fun though. I am always reminded of that scene from "Apollo 13" where the wife asks if they can just sell the house instead of clean up after the party. We had several people offer to help and a couple of moms even picked up the basement before they left even though I told them to just leave it and I would get to it sometime this week (if you read this, thank you Sharon and Annie). Andrew and I just put away the food that night. Andrew had to put out some hay for his cows the next morning so I was in charge of clean-up. It was probably two in the afternoon before everything was cleaned and put away. I even put up our Valentine's Day banner and then we returned all the stuff I borrowed from my parents back to their house.

So that is all done and we had a good time. Now it is back to the boring stuff-finish tax stuff, get caught up on office work and try to check things off my to-do list. I signed Ellie up for tumbling today and she is very excited. It starts in a couple of weeks and wouldn't you know, it is on Thursday afternoons. Everything is on Thursday. So now we have to pick up Jackson at 3, tumbling at 4, Little K at 4:30 and small group at 6:30. Should be fun.