A Wedding Flashback Party

We hosted a fun party at our house for the week of Valentine's. We invited 5 other couples to come relive their wedding days with us in a Wedding Flashback party.

We started with a Wedding Song game where each couple had to guess the wedding songs of everyone in the room and whose belonged to whom. The songs went back to hits from the 80's to contemporary favorites. It was tough, but Joseph did really well guessing for our team since I already knew all the answers from creating the game.

(Jennifer came dressed up for the occasion and looked awesome!)

The next game we played was a Newlywed Game. The girls got a set of questions and the guys got another set and we wrote down our answers and then tried to guess what our spouse would have answered. If your answer matched your spouse's you got a point. Questions were things like: "What was the first thing you noticed about your spouse?", "My husband is the world's best ________", "What scent most reminds you of your spouse?", "If you could get rid of one thing of your spouse's what would it be?", and so on. Some of the answers were hilarious like when Curtis described their first kiss.

After we compared answers we tallied up how well we'd all done and the winners got a gift card as a prize. The VanWoerkom's took home the title of the couple who knows each other the best, and that's with 12 years under their belts! The couple with the lowest point total h̶a̶d̶ t̶o̶ got to reenact cutting their wedding cake.

I was shocked when it was the "newlyweds" of only 2 years who lost, but in the end the Ashtons were the best couple to do this because they really hammed up the cutting of the cake. And then they did something they didn't do on their wedding day and smashed the cake into each other's faces when feeding it to each other.

After this we turned on their wedding song and made them dance to it in front of everyone. They hammed that up, too, and it was awesome.

We had such a fun night and look forward to the next group date night!

Jumping Fools

Here's a little recap of our February:

For Austin's 5th birthday he wanted to go to a place with wall-to-wall trampolines and he kindly invited us to join him there. The girls were only too willing.

We had so much fun bouncing everywhere, especially doing the big jumps into the foam pits!

Too bad none of our pictures turned out very clearly...oh well.

What is this boulder that Avery is relaxing under you ask?

It's just another of Joseph's crazy ideas for a Sunday afternoon at home that the kids loved.

The love sac was piled between the couch and chair with only a gap big enough for the kidlets to squeeze through (believe me, I let my kids talk me into trying it and my claustrophobia kicked in big time before I could work my way out!)

They had a blast piling in together and forcing their way out of the blockade of pillows we threw up to make it even more challenging.

William must have gone through dozens of times and was a big, big fan.

For Valentine's Day this year a friend in our moms group hosted a Pinkalicious tea party at the park. Avery, Will, and I went while Sophie was at school and had a great time.

The girls were invited to a friend's pirate birthday party. His creative mom had them all decked out in pirate paraphernalia by the end which they were big fans of. (By the way, I think we just might be raising two pre-pubescent boys in those two girlies. They think it's hilarious when someone burps or farts and talk potty talk all the time when they think we're not listening. They love Star Wars and bugs and gross things. I don't know what happened to my sweet little girls! Maybe they'll get the potty humor out of their systems now so they won't think it's funny in 10 years? I can only hope!)

Sophie continues to love her Transitional Kindergarten class and got rave reviews from her teacher at my conference with her two weeks ago.

Avery took a karate class with some girl friends of hers and they had a blast. She seems to have a natural talent for it and picked up on everything pretty quickly.

She loved learning to punch and kick correctly, and how to count to ten in Japanese.

But her favorite thing, aside from the running, was learning how to use the nunchucks.

She whipped those puppies around like she was born doing it! It was fun to see her loving it.

The girls still love gymnastics and this last class session were lucky enough to have their cousins Austin and Gabe join their class. Those 4 had so much fun together, swinging on bars and jumping on the trampoline and sailing across the room on the zip line.

Sophie and Avery also like it when we have enough time to sneak over to the big gym and watch the big gymnasts do tricks on the floor, beam, and bars. They sit mesmerized by the acrobatics and I must admit it makes me nostalgic for being able to do those tricks as well.

Because we just don't ever have enough cousin time, we went swimming in February with our favorite OC Lambs one day.

Avery and Sophie's best buddies on the planet, Gabe and Austin.

The highlight of this trip to the pool was swimming with Uncle Geoff. He tirelessly threw the kids up high in the air over and over again as they'd squeal with delight...

...and I think a teeny bit of terror, too. That's what makes it so fun though, right?

I LOVE this shot my dad got of Sophie! She's looking like she'll either be a future gymnast or cheerleader. That's the makings of a really great toe-touch I think!

Will and I hung out in the hot tub most of the time. He has this funny thing he always does in the water which is to lay down and then put his hands under his head like he's just kicked back and relaxing in the sun. It's so cute.

When he'd get too hot he'd make his way over to the pool and Uncle Geoff would throw him high too. He was a little terrified by it but didn't complain much.

It must be growing up in Southern California but all our kids are such fishes. The 4 oldest all swim really well and I'm glad we have so many chances to practice, especially with such great weather all year round. We really are spoiled here.

We enjoyed having my parents in town that weekend, even for just a very short trip. "It's always fun when Grandma comes, when Grandma comes--hooray!"

This little guy loves life! He is (usually) so happy and so much fun to be around. He's a total ham; if he sees he's done something to make you laugh he'll do it again and again to keep getting a reaction.

Will has learned how to sign "please" and whenever anyone gives him something he will say, "Ta-tu, Mamama." I love hearing it! Then I'll say, "You're welcome, Buddy! I love you!" and he will blow me a kiss. Melts my heart!

We sure love having this sweet boy in our family.