Christmas Miracle Kitchen, Part 3

Believe it or not, it's done. Tuesday, December 20th, just 18 days after we started this insanity and it's actually finished. Well, except for the faucet which Scott was installing himself. After 8 hours and 3 trips to Home Depot, we figured that this plumbing project had about a 50/50 whether it was going to work and we'd be done, or it was going to spring a leak and ruin all of our lovely new cabinets...and Christmas dreams.

But at 12:30 that night (so technically Wednesday, two days before the Xmas Eve-Eve Party), Scott fired up the water and...miracle of miracles, it worked! We still don't know what all those extra parts are for, but who cares! Game on.

Over the past 11 years, our Xmas Eve-Eve Party has, uh...evolved. It started out as (Phase 1) a housewarming party where everyone went off the hook, (Phase 2) a great time for all of our friends to hang out before they scattered across the valley and the country to spend the holidays with their families, to (Phase 3) where a lot of us have kids and some of us don't so things were a little more mellow, to (Phase Now) where the kids almost outnumber the adults and we have to hire tween babysitters to help manage the chaos while the adults try to recreate Phases 1-3.

As you can see from the pictures, chaos management is limited at best! I think in a mere 4 hours the dozen or so kids that were at the party managed to unload every single toy, car, train track, domino, lego, block...you name it! Our house looked like a toy bomb went off. They had a ball, and they were exhausted! (the babysitter girls were probably more exhausted). It took us like 2 hours to clean up in the morning but it did give us a chance to organize everything before Christmas gifts started to arrive so that was nice.

Becky and Amy...11th anniversary vets! Wait, where is Becky's red cup?

The adults were doing their best to cause some chaos as well. Really making use of that big giant island, but the front room was packed as well and I assume everyone was a little hoarse the next day because it was really, really loud. Maybe the little ones downstairs amped up the baseline decibel levels. Yeah, that's it. We had tons of fabulous food - there seemed to be some kind of bruschetta bake off for this party, I think there were 3 or 4 and all fantastic! - lots of donations for the Road Home, and...

Brad, Alek & Lori

Alek was the big winner of the push off contest. (I found out later that this was  lie. Amy actually creamed him with her yoga push-ups, but we're going to let the firefighter take the glory...for the sake of service people everywhere, and because we don't want people to know how freakishly strong yogis are.)

One of these days, I'm going to do a Christmas Eve-Eve Party tribute and find a couple of pix from each of the 11 years we've been doing this to commemorate this tradition. I really, really love it. It's work and it's changed over the years but getting to spend some quality time with my incredible friends, invite some new people into our circle, watch our kids building friendships that we hope will last a lifetime like ours, share our good fortune with those in need, and laugh and love together. That, for me, is the Christmas spirit in its finest.