The weather was perfect, hardly a breeze, clear skies, cool air and fall colors in the trees. In spite of these perfect conditions (and because we had just had hot dogs on Wednesday) we decided to cook up some hamburgers on the new grill. Michelle has been using her new (early Christmas present) grill for bottling our chicken meat; we've beat our poor stove into the ground trying to bottle our pears, peaches, grape juice, etc...the stove was not designed for bottling and canning; so we invested in a 3 burner grill to handle to intense heat from the bottling and set it up in the garage.
We have now discovered that the garage is a great place for bottling but not a great place for cooking, smoking, BBQ-ing, or anything else the will produce smoke!
We had the family start to arrive around 5:00 pm, around the same time we started the fire. Darius and Kristen (along with Morgan and Olivia) were the first to arrive, followed closely by Trista, Cheyenne, Larissa and Mike (Trista's new boyfriend).Larissa wasted no time jumping into the social circles of conversation...through text messaging with...well no, it wasn't with us!
Aleky spent a lot of time hanging out by the fire, in his high chair. For the most part he was content but he was quite excited when the food started showing up on the tables. His first course was...bread.
Despite our incredible success with roasting hot dogs 3 nights previous, the boys acted like it was torture to eat a hot dog this time. They were okay with the jell-o and definite approved of the Cheetos and potato chips but hot dogs we "so yesterday" and they would have nothing to do with them.
We've heard rumors about the guy named Mike from Georgia that Trista has been dating for a couple month now. We were quite excited to finally meet him. While he claims to be from the south I strained to pick up any hint of the true southern accent; if it wasn't for the fact that they met through his sister who lives in Georgia I might have to wonder! But over-all he seems like a very cool guy.
While Cheyenne tries to appear like an innocent college freshman we know that she's anything but innocent. After bathing the boys and putting them to bed we played the game "Cranium." Cheyenne was on the team with Trista and Mike and it was obvious that they were in cahoots and had played the game before.
Larissa took some time off the text messaging to join teams with Darius and Kristen. Don't let 'em fool ya, they are good at this game as well. I think someone forgot to remind them about proper gaming etiquette at our home...we are supposed to ALWAYS win. As it turns out we ended in 3rd place of the 3 teams! I don't supposed that had anything to do with poor luck, no TV knowledge and limited exposure to this game?
It was quite an enjoyable evening and we were sorry that it had to end. We called the game just after 11:00 pm when Morgan's energy finally ran out and she was too tired to carry on. We had a lot of laughs, sometimes a little too loud (somehow our boys slept through it all!) but an enjoyable evening never-the-less. We are going to miss the Joneses as they head off to Oregon for new opportunities. They have been wonderful friends and great family. We wish them the very best as they begin this next chapter in their lives. And we hope to stay in touch and up to date with each excited new adventure that they have! Good luck guys...hope to see you soon!
