New Year's Eve 2009

The fact that I'm summarizing New Year's Eve at 9:42pm says a lot about our style of partying.
We spent the day cleaning and organizing Lauren's bedroom, which required all 4 of us and resulted in a 50 pound bag of trash, plus a bag of DI donations. (We did Emma's room yesterday.) We also did 6 loads of laundry and put away all the Christmas totes in the crawl space under our house. We were ready for the big party by 6:00pm.
The Christensens came over with meatballs, a cheeseball, and some sweet, gooey Chex mix, which I LOVE. We made cheesy artichoke dip, bruschetta with crusty baguette slices, and cake balls. We sliced up some beef stick, cheese and crackers and put out some M&M's and nuts. Everything was delicious. This is after we had already enjoyed most of the food...

Lauren went home with the Christensens after some serious begging from both Ketti and Lauren for a sleepover tonight. It is Lauren's first non-family sleepover and the first time Ketti has ever had a non-family guest sleep over. As Lauren said, we're pretty strict about when and if the girls ever sleep over at someone's house. The Christensens are on our list of about 3 people we wouldn't hesitate to let the girls spend the night with.
We played Wii and talked a lot during our party...
Jens let Landon know that he does NOT like to be called "Bubba," and Ketti let me know that the milk chocolate covered cake balls made her want to throw up, but the white ones were OK.

*Here's a side note: It came to me that it would be fun to have a party with nuts and balls as the theme. There's a lot you could do besides eat all the "ball-oriented" foods, like have nut-cracking competitions, play all kinds of ball games, and listen to music from the Nutcracker. There's really no end to the fun.