Never Before, Never Again

Yesterday, the fam came over and we had breakfast for lunch, then we bought some seeds for the garden, checked out the new plot and picked up our new canoe!!!
It was starting out to be a pretty great day.
Then, it started to rain, so we went home and pulled out RISK!


This is the beginning board. I'm blue and pretty equally dispersed around the world.

I had never played RISK before, and was honestly a little afraid for the following reasons:
1. This game is notorious for taking HOURS to play.
2. Everytime I've seen people play this game (except that one time between M. and N., who are both really good natured girls) at least one person leaves the room early, angry, and hurt.
3. Every game hits you at a different psyphological level, and this one hits me at a level that is way above my ability to maturly cope with loss. (I mean come on, someone is attacking you (and probably verbally insulting your intelligence for no reason) and you get less opportunity to win back your pride than you attacker gets to take you over. It really is like a war.)
4. I don't know how to play, it seems really confusing, and I already have a complex about looking stupid when I do something new. Why on earth would I want to do something new, and confusing, in front of one or more people who are (see above) attacking me and verbally insulting my intelligence for no reason, especially when my odds of success are so calculatedly low?

I'm not going to tell you how the game ended. It's not important. But now I can say, I know how to play RISK, and if I can help it, I will try very hard to avoid ever playing it again.

Ooooooo, Fonduuuuuuue!

We got a fondue set as one of our gifts (the thank you note is in the mail, by the way), and we decided to use it! So we invited 4 other couples over for a dinner party. (We like dinner parties! Mostly I think we just like to fill our house with people.) This was not just a chocolate and pretzels event (although we had those too).

For the first course, our friends served a cheese fondue with bread. Followed every closely by the second course: beef, chicken and pork cooked on a beefy fondue broth. We put out some sauces. I think the peanut one was the most surprising and most well liked.

My most favorite thing about fondue meals is that it takes a long time to eat. You stick a piece of meat and put it in the boiling broth then wait, and hopefully talk, while your meal cooks. I love to hear people talk, so it was a ton of fun for me.

For dessert, we finally busted out the chocolate and pretzels. Yum! It was so so much fun and so very good.

First Dinner Guests!

Last weekend Matt and I had our first dinner guests. The Stevensens, one of the members of Matt's YSA branch presidency accepted an invitation to come to our home for dinner. We were so excited we hung extra pictures on the wall and went grocery shopping again. We vacuumed and got out all of our favorite games, put the chicken in the oven, and waited for our guests. I felt like some old English family from one of Jane Austen's novels. We even dug out our good table clothe and ironed it.

For dinner we served cornflake chicken, rosemary potatoes, veggies, fruit, and the best great value brand cherrylimeade drink mix. Yum!!! But the best part was definitly Sister Stevensen's Keylime pie.

After dinner and dessert, we played 3 games of rummi kub. I only won one time. Matt won once, and Brother Stevensen took us all in the end. I'm so grateful they were our first dinner and game guests. They didn't mind that the potatoes were too rosemarieeee and we one two out of three games.

I'm still dreaming of that pie!