Living and Learning on the Move

We had to plan this party quite quickly! As you know, in this lifestyle one never knows how long their neighbors will be around before they get the “itch” move on!  :-)  Just kidding! Yes, that's true; but, in this case one of the families that participated were scheduled to leave in two short days! Now, THIS blog post is going to be fun! As you all know, the kids are benefiting with an ice cream party thanks to a lot of wonderful people out there! Here are the pictures of the party as I promised, Auntie Stephanie!

To begin with, I had all of these wonderful ideas of having a huge party - you know, the bigger, the better! I was going to buy streamers, screamers, party hats, and all of the wonderful things that make up a party. However, when I started thinking about the practicability of such things in our environment, it wasn’t such a realistic thought! You see, if we had the party here at Thousand Trails, I can see us putting up streamers and all just to “get in trouble” and have to take them down. Not to mention feeling like a bit of a nuisance to the elderly in this community.  *giggle*  We thought about and decided it would be a lot more fun to make the mess elsewhere so others can clean it up! Just kidding… (us ladies ended up cleaning up the mess none-the-less!) After running some figures of what was do-able with that many people, we decided to have our party at CiCi’s Pizza! Remember altogether, we had a total of 23 people! We were able to have all we can eat and the managers were even letting us bring in ice cream along with all our goodies for sundaes! We decided against the screamers that you can blow (might get us in a bit of trouble with CiCi’s), figured streamers and other ideas were out, so we focused on what we all LOVE the most – food and good people to socialize and share it with! Needless to say, you can tell by all of these wonderful smiles that EVERYONE had a wonderful time! A great time was had by all! (Beware, lots of pictures for Auntie Stephanie and everyone else to follow!)   All in all, it was an AMAZING time! Thank you to all that made this happen in so many ways! You know who you are!

A great overview picture of all 23 of us!

Adults socializing!

My daughter and her good friend - BFFAEA - (This is what they say - Best Friends Forever And Ever AMEN!)

Older boys having fun!

More of the older boys having fun!

I should call these guys the "big kids" - Allen and his father-in-law

Margie and her lovely mother

Rita and Peter DeMichiel

Katie and her daughter

Schrier family (minus my son - how is he getting away with not being in these pictures?)

Gary and Kerry Murphy

Rita showing off her FUDGE swirl. How yummy is that?! You can't tell us ladies like our chocolate can you?  :-)

What a beautiful smile from Katherine!

The dishing of the ice cream! We had three huge choices either vanilla, chocolate, or fudge swirl!

My son having the best of both worlds (ice cream and the electronics/video game area)!

Love these messy smiles! :)

This is where the kids had the most fun I think! They had the choice of cool whip, chocolate syrup, caramel syrup, sprinkles, and I think one other choice? They made some great creations! I should have taken pictures of them!  *giggle*

You can tell right here that Lizzy has a BRAIN FREEZE! We all know what that is, right? Everyone had one of those before? Yikes! They aren't fun!

A great group picture of many of the full-time family kids before we left. Unfortunately, we did miss a few of the kids that had to leave early (Lundy). They grow up way too fast (which make all of these great pictures even better)!