Party time!

Time to record about the big birthday double party bash!

My birthday was on the Thursday and I shared it with 3 children in my class - what are the chances??? So we had a bit of party excitement there that day. Last year my kids didn't know it was my birthday but I liked the fact that they did this year.

In the evening (after a lot of indecisiveness) I went for a meal at the Big Bang with John and family. Favourite restaurant!

Then came the hard work. Months ago I was thinking it would be nice to have a birthday party with board games and wondered if I could persuade John to have a joint party as his birthday is a couple of weeks later. And then we started going out and so I worked on persuading him!! For some reason, we decided that it would be a good idea to have two parties. One on the Friday night for work colleagues and one on Saturday night for other friends, one at my house and one at his house. Now I am glad we did it, but will never do two like that again, especially on consecutive nights as it was so exhausting - expecially during the day on Saturday as we were working at John's house!!

We had great fun making movie invitations. All credit to John, as it was his idea and I would never have done it, but am so glad we did! Somewhere along the lines, a board game party turned into a board game party with crystal maze theme. Here are the sneakily edited invites:

We had a really positive response to the invites which was very flattering.

So party number 1: my house, Friday night, 3 couples from school. Managed to rearrange the lounge so it looked nice and get everything set up beforehand and risotto cooked despite getting a flat tyre on the way home from school! Team Ed and Team Richard were picked out of the crystal ball and then the games begun. First up was the mystery round: Rapidough!

On events where not everyone was partaking, others could look through the 'windows' into the gaming area! Picked up from the school art room!

Round 2 - skill, jenga!

Round 3 - after tea and precake, bananagrams! I was delighted with the squealed response I got from 2 teachers when bananagrams was revealed!

Entering Medieval land - these were whisked out of the recycling bin!

Party take 2! John did a great job working so hard in the day to make his house look perfect. And I think it looked really lovely ready for a party (and so I took quite a few photos!)

We had help setting up in the afternoon too :-) and even managed to get a nice photo of just the two of us!

We were brought some lovely sparkly which was exciting and we opened during the pre-party mingling stage.

And these were the crystals that were up for grabs when you won a round:

And let the games begin... round 1, mystery, rapidough. Sounding familiar???