Fiesta!

Fiesta!  We had a lovely Mexican fiesta tonight to say farewell to 2009.  We made a huge amount of food.  Truly a gargantuan spread.  We discovered we loved the recipe for Mexican fruit cake and the calabacitas (squash) recipe.  Both will reappear on some future menu.  I loved the horchata drink. It was vaguely chai like, but less intense.  Very  nice.  I think Lissa liked it too.  We liked flautas but are not so much fried food eaters so I don't think we would make them again.  Tostados got mixed reviews as well. 

After we ate, we played a trivia game with some facts I had culled from various sources on Mexican culture and history, and topography.  I tried to mix it up between challenging and things that would be easy enough for KC to figure out.  Ironically, KC figured out one of the harder ones.  The word for town square is zocalo.  I gave 3 choices and because KC knew the spanish words of the other two choices (casa and estado) he figured out by default that zocalo was the new word that he didn't know. 

Then we played a home made version of Bingo using pictures of things associated with Mexico.  I printed off a bunch of clip art and just mixed them up on a piece of paper.  Also added some spanish words that the kids (except Lissa are familiar with) and then changed the arrangement 6 times, photocopying it each time.  So everyone got their own "game board" and then I just held up a copy of the picture or word in question.

After that we read through our "notable moments of the year"  We have a big envelope where we drop in notes about things large and small that are meaningful throughout the year.  It could be things like seeing an eagle, or going away to camp, or the Yankees winning the world series!  LOL  It was, to put it mildly pretty diverse.

After that, we put on coats and went outside to blow bubbles and play with lightsticks in the dark.  I had the skinny light sticks and we tried after we fooled around to spell out Happy New Year on top of our pop up.  We only had enough lights to spell Happy New!  So happy new and blessed old to everyone!