We love having or going to parties with just grown ups, so we decided to start our own several years ago. We had some friends who threw a Valentine's Day party and Christmas and Easter are pretty well covered without even more to do, so we picked Halloween. It's so much fun!
This year the kids wanted to have a little party with their friends too, so I said we could do that (I'm crazy. I know it.) Since this was the first one, we couldn't invite everyone, but we did invite a lot of kids, especially ones whose ages line up with our kids). Andy ended up having Nutcracker practice from 12-5pm, so I was very happy when a few moms stayed to help me. The girls (not Vincent because his birthday is in January, so he's not a sunbeam yet) had Primary Program practice in the morning, so we had their party from 3-5pm and ours from 7-10pm. Our kids went to someone else's house to be babysat and had a fun time over there.
The girls prepared some things for games for the party in the last few weeks. Elizabeth has always been excellent at bossing people around (I mean that in a nice way), so she'd get everyone's attention and tell them what we were doing next or where to go or that we'd start the next thing when everyone is sitting. Yeah, I just counted using my pictures and there were 25 kids and two babies at our party. Crazy.
We had several witches, superheroes, and ninjas. We also had Mario, A Transformer, Referee, Fairy, Mulan, Angel, Puppy, Ballerina, Cat, Pirate, and a Clown.
Click on picture to see it bigger.

(I love Google's Picasa. It freaked me out a little at the beginning that it took all the picture files from my computer, but now I love that they are all online in case something happens to them from my computer-although Andy backs it up pretty frequently with an external hard drive from work and we make DVD's of the files on here occasionally-and I can edit pictures there-lightening dark ones, cropping, making collages-for free. I recommend it.)
Here are some of the games the kids played.

The games we played were:
*Pass the Pumpkin (Like Hot Potato mixed with Musical Chairs) The kids really liked this.
*Blowing up Balloons (and then I tied and wrote names on pretty much all of them. I don't really recommend this one for such a big group.)
*Halloween word game for the big kids (making as many words as they could)
*Yarn Spiderweb for the little kids (They didn't really get it until the end...)
*Sugar Cookie decorating
*Snack eating
*Foam Jack-o-Lanterns (used a small foam pumpkin and they drew pictures on it)
*Costume Contest divided by age (0-3, 4-7, 8-10+)
*Guessing jars
Costume winners were the cute puppy for the little group, the fairy for the middle group, and there was a tie for the big kids with the referee and the ninja with red on his tunic.
The parents reported at church this morning that their kids all had a great time, so I guess it was a success. Will we do it again? I don't know yet. Probably.
Anyone else want to do it instead of me????
We had a few hours between parties to clean up, feed the kids, and take them to the babysitter's house. My plan was to rest a little since I was up late finishing party planning and as soon as I laid down at 3:30am, Abby woke up until 4am. (I know you all look shocked that I was up that late, but normally I'm up until 2am anyway. And Saturday night I went to bed early at 1am and slept straight through until the kids running through the house yelling woke me up at 9am.)
Our Grown up Costume Party was a hit. We had some pretty great costumes. Which one is YOUR favorite?

The adult costumes were an Angel with Spiderman, a Mummy (that didn't last long before he fell apart...), Fire (Andy) with a Baker (NaDell), Ken and Barbie (who just had a baby six weeks ago and looks that amazing!), Jack-o-Lantern with a "Generic Costume", a Witch with a Ceiling Fan, a King with Sharsha (from the movie Willow), one non-costumed couple-they normally dress up, The Three Little Bears, Death Bevan with a Japanese Bride, Dog the Bounty Hunter with Beth, a Prince with a Frog, Flower children with a Honey Do man, and Emperor Palpatine (and I failed to take a standing alone picture of our Angel and Devil set, so they have their own picture below:

Ken and Barbie won our Couple's Costume Contest and Death Bevan won for our Individual Costume Contest.
We didn't play the little kid games, but we did play MarioKart, Apples 2 Apples, Whonu?, Eye to Eye, ate some yummy food, and had a lot of laughs (mostly at Ken's pants).
It was a pretty awesome party and my fruity punch was delicious too.
Now, for the REAL Halloween. We are going to have a fabulous time. School for the girls and I get to help in their classes while Abby and Vincent play at a friend's house, resting in the afternoon, then picking the girls up from school, taking Olivia and her friend to ballet, coming home, eating sandwiches, dressing up, Trunk-or-Treating, going to a friend's family Halloween night Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup party, and then going to Kennewick to visit Andy's parents. That will be a full and busy night, but that's how we like it around here.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!