Carnival!

We are blessed to have neighbors who we absolutely love and call our friends. We have lived next door to each other for over 20 years now and I can honestly say, I couldn’t have hand picked better people to live side by side with.

Yesterday they had a carnival in honor of Celeste's mother who was turning 90! Celeste is one of 16 kids, so a party at their house always means lots of food, lots of people, and lots of fun. Oh did we have a very fun and very exhausting day! Warning: This post contains lots and lots of pictures, more pictures then I have ever posted in a single post...well ever! Scroll at will.

Each child (and there were lots of 'em) started off making their own personalized party bag. There were all sorts of stickers and letters for them to use. Everyone had a pretty stylin' bag.

Then they moved on to the sand art table. See all the pretty colored sands?? Well fast-forward about a half hour and all those pretty sand containers were a mish mass of colors!

Oh the food! It never ended. Hot pretzels and mustard were passed out while the kids did sand art. There was shrimp, stuffies (stuffed quohaugs for your non-Rhode Islanders), chowder, corn dogs, french fries, sweet potato fries, popcorn....and that was just the first course.

John somehow landed the job of clam cake maker. He still doesn't know how it happened, but one minute he was at the grill with Tom drinking a beer and the next he was frying up batter!

There even hired face painters. The adorable little girl in orange is my neighbor’s granddaughter Madison, who I adore. She's the one with the bumblebee on her cheek. Even the birthday girl got a rainbow. Cousin Ellie went for the full-faced rabbit.

The older boys sat on this teeter-totter for ages. I was surprised cause I thought they would say it was too babyish for them. Evan really enjoyed it, but Jesse's face seems to say "get me off of this thing".

Next it was time for more food. Round 2 - burgers and dogs with a bunch of toppings.

Coke in glass bottles! My neighbors are classy!

Then the games began. Tom & Celeste always have fun games and tons of prizes for everyone involved. There was plate spinning, a popcorn race, pin the tail on the monkey, land a ball in a fishbowl (yup live fish), tin can bowling, and there was the obstacle course. Oh did that have us all laughing.

Each team had to throw a bowl through a hoop, take an inner tube swim floaty thing…oh what’s the word for them…you know those floaties the kids use in the pool….anyway.. they had to pass it over their entire body, grab a hat out of a bag, put it on, stick balloons up their shirts, put lipstick on and kiss the birthday girl who was waiting at the end of the line. Poor lady ended up with a face full of lipstick, but she smiled and laughed all the way through it.

There was a dunk tank and a water slide, both hugely popular with the kids....well the dunk tank was pretty popular with the adults too.

More and more food came out....ribs, chicken, meatballs, sausage, antipasto, nachos and cheese, it seemed like the food would never end.

One of the messiest and funniest parts of the evening began around dusk. The pie-eating contest. This was broken up into 2 contests. One for the adults and one for the kids. The kids each got half a little pie. Jesse won the kid contest. The adults got a whole pie. Oh lordy was there a huge mess at the end of the contest. One of Celeste's brothers decided to fill his mouth with whipped cream and then was nice enough to "spray" all of his competitors with a lovely stream of cream. The cream spraying started a food fight. Just imagine blueberries and cream…..everywhere! Oh man what a mess. I high tailed it out of shooting range to save my camera, so sorry, no shots of the food fight.

Renee got a little messy.

The night ended with snow cones, cotton candy, root beer & orange creamsicle floats, cake, ice cream, cookies and lots of other desserts. The fire pit was lit and everyone kinda chilled out till the wee hours of the morning.

My neighbors know how to throw a party.

Oh I almost forgot...meet the two newest members of the family....Moe and Larry. The boys won them in the fish toss. I'll keep you updated on how long they are "with us".