Call us crazy, but we let Aaron invite 11 boys to his 11th birthday party. Yikes! Then dad asks how are we going to get them all to church and us, too? That requires 16 seatbelts, and we only have 12! Well, things worked out. Some boys couldn’t come, some were picked up early, and we borrowed a neighbor’s minivan(Gabby’s mom). At least three of the parents told us it was cool that we were taking their kids to church. Here’s a picture before things got out of hand.
   The party was interesting. Aaron told us he was careful to invite friends that would get along, and the house got pretty noisy as all the kids ‘got along’. Two rooms were set up with video games, and maybe half the kids brought their Nintendo DSs. As if that was not enough to keep them busy, they also played PC games on the upstrairs computer. Dinner was very noisy as was the gift opening. Then singing happy birthday was noisiest of all, with all the kids shouting at the top of their lungs. In our house and with the more or less common group of friends that Adam and Aaron share, they actually sing a different song “Yellow Llama to You!”. Read on…
   Cyndi and Adam wrote a Mad Lib for Aaron, a tradition we started for Adam’s birthday this year(this is where Yellow Llama comes from). Mad Libs, if you don’t know, is a story with missing words, and a scribe asks the audience for the missing words without telling anyone what the story is until he is finished. Then he reads the story aloud, and the results are usually pretty funny because of the very strange context the missing words are given. Anyhow, the Mad Lib was a riot of a success.
   Bed time was another adventure. Eddie went to bed relatively early, and Cyndi stayed up while one group watched a movie and another played video games. Eventually, they all ‘went to bed’, but at 2:30am(!), Eddie got woken up with the shenanigans and read them them the ‘never wake up the Dad’ riot act. By morning, all was well, and the guests helped cleanup all the popcorn that littered the floor, couches, chairs, bookshelves, toilet…
and we took a total of 6 friends to church.