.:Meet the Ritchies:.

We celebrated New Year’s Eve with good friends and family, hosting our fifth annual party!  Normally we do a theme that people come wearing a costume for, but this year we decided to just have a night of intellectual stimulation.  And it was a success!

I put Enzo to bed at his regular 7pm bedtime but unfortunately he woke up around 10pm and I couldn’t get him back to sleep.  So he joined the party!

wearing my favorite accessory

party animal

We had a few littles at our party this year!  David, one of Mark’s soccer mates brought his 3 year old daughter Eva.  And Eddie & Owen (who is also 3) came for the first half.   They had a lot of fun playing with Veda’s littlest pet shop toys in Enzo’s room.

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Our party guests…

George and Drew

Jared and Julie

Andi & Tony (and Eva, who is too cute and showed up in a lot of pictures)

Julie <3

Some good looking gents - Perry, Tony and Drew

We kicked the night off by playing some Minute-To-Win-It style games, drawing two names to participate in head to head competition.

First up – David and Althea (Claire’s friend who stayed over) doing the game called Hanky Panky.  They had to pull out all the kleenex from the box using only one hand, first one done wins!

Althea won!

Next was the game Breakfast Scramble where Jared and Amber had to put together puzzle pieces to make the front of a cereal box.  Amber was the winner for this one.

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I think the most fun game to watch was Perry and Julie playing How’s it Hanging, where they had to get the oranges into a hula hoop using a banana swinging from their waist.

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Amber laughing at (with?) Perry

Julie and Tony had to shake their stuff playing Junk in the Trunk, where they had to shake all the ping pong balls out of a kleenex box attached to the back of their waist.

Tony won!

And finally, Drew and Tony faced off in a game called Face the Cookie, where they had to get a cookie from their forehead to their mouth without using their hands.  Tony was a pro at this, like he had done it before!  Drew thought he could just will the cookie to move by staring at the ceiling, that didn’t work too well for him.

cookie on his forehead, not moving

Tony won!

I am glad we have smart friends who were such great sports.   Mark put together some trivia questions, among them movie quotes from the last four decades, and pictures of notable deaths from 2011.  Everyone broke into teams:

The "A" team

Team Awesome (a Scotsman and two 13 year olds, it was interesting)

The Loners

Team O'Neil

And there was a little cheating…

no iPhones!

I think everyone had fun, and it wasn’t a walk in the park either.  Mark made the questions kind of tough!  I don’t even know who won because by the time we played all four rounds, with the countdown to midnight happening in the middle, nobody really cared to crown a winner.   Thank you to everyone who made it, we had  so much fun and we loved welcoming in 2012 with such great company!!  Happy New Year!

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<3

xoxo