5 Year Reunion

We had our friends from Costa Rica come visit us on Saturday.

They are not currently from, neither were any of them born, in Costa Rica, but they'll always be our "friends from Costa Rica" cause that is where we all met. It's been five years since that adventure (that was documented beginning here), so it was fun to get everyone together again. We all met up at a park a few years ago, and we also had the Meyers up for a visit two years ago, but it's been too long. Yikes, just found the post of that get together, and nevermind, it wasn't two years... it was 3 and a half years ago! Yes, the time is flying. 

This past year, each of our families added a baby boy. Abraham, Owen, and Adam. Bringing our 7-5-7 kid totals to 10-7-10. All 27 kids had a good time visiting and playing. Wait, not, it was just 26 kids... Michael didn't make it (Joseph missed him). Mary taught our kids how to play some soda pop game where you throw quarters and whoever gets a quarter in the middle cup of pop doesn't have to speed drink their soda, but everyone else does, and the last person to chug it looses and has to drink an extra cup with some soy sauce in it or something gross like that. They thought it was fun. No way I was playing that game though.

We adults just visited like we did 5 years ago. Just this time it was cold outside. Not like in the jungle of Costa Rica.

We had the day open and free and spent the whole time visiting, just like the good ol' days - Nov 22, 2010 - visiting in the kitchen of Costa Rica

That was then, this is now:

We took a break from visiting and played one game with everyone that was new to us and pretty fun ~ Rules: 1) everyone write three names of famous people on three slips of paper. 2) mix all the names in a bowl. 3) Divide into teams (we had 3 teams). Play: Round one - get your team to guess each name you draw from the bowl as you describe it but don't use the name. Get as many names as you can in 90 seconds. Keep playing until all names have been drawn and guessed. Round 2 - same names, draw them one at a time, and get your team to guess by acting it out, no words. Round 3 - same thing, only this time no acting, and just one word. The men won with 43 points. Mom's came in a close second at 42, and I think the kids had like 28 points. It was fun. Some of the names were easy, others were hard, like Genghis Khan... don't know who chose that one, it forced us all to get creative in how we communicated. Sometimes we did sign language or spelled it out in the air.

That's a big group of people around a small screen. I think that beats our past family record.

11/24/10 - watching tv on Thanksgiving Eve 5 years ago~
Watching "Inside Out" in our unfinished basement - 11/28/15

The Meyers headed home around 9 pm on Saturday and the Royals had called earlier to ask if they could spend the night, so they slept over and came to church with us. We had fun visiting more on Sunday and they stayed the day. We still had lots of thanksgiving meat and pies to share. One sad thing - during our evening of fun, I noticed a certain little person play with the thermostat, and I forgot to fix it, until on Sunday morning when I came down the stairs to feel the freezing air.  It was like 60 degrees! And they were in the unfinished basement where it was even colder. They were freezing! I felt horrible. First thing I'm going to do whenever we have money is to finish the basement so we have a decent place to host friends.