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Friday night Pizza and Halo Night

December 7, 2008 By

For this weekend’s Parent Blogger’s Network Blog Blast, we’re supposed to talk about our family holiday game traditions, what games we play when we get together for Thanksgiving or Christmas. But my extended family doesn’t play games when we get together. We eat and talk, we clear the dishes, then we set back down with plates of pie and cups of coffee and talk some more. And that’s exactly what we like about getting together!

Instead, my family’s game tradition is Friday night Pizza and Halo Night. For the last three years, almost every Friday night, we order pizza, and then while I poke around online, Chris and the boys play Halo. They meet up with their friends on Xbox Live and form parties, take on other teams, talk trash into the headsets. It’s a weekly tradition that we all look forward to. In fact, any suggestion to have pizza any night besides Friday is always met with incredulous looks and protests that we would be disrupting the flow of space and time if we ate pizza on, say, a Tuesday.

Parent Bloggers Network wants to know what games you play during holiday gatherings. Email your post to parentbloggers@gmail.com by midnight tonight and you could win the Grand Prize:

Boogie SuperStar
Boom Blox
Brain Quest
Hasbro Family Game Night
Littlest Pet Shop
Monopoly
Nerf N-Strike
Travel Games for Dummies

plus 3 runners-up will get to choose one game from the above list! So hurry and write up your post and send it in for your chance to win!  You can read more stories about family game nights here, and check out more awesome games from Electronic Arts here.

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Grandparent Talk-perfect game for holiday gatherings

November 24, 2008 By

grandparent talk game During this upcoming holiday season, many of us will spend time with our parents and grandparents. It can be so hard to have time to just sit and talk these days, with everyone’s schedules so busy. Even my parents are hard to spend time with, they have busier schedules than I do! But while we are visiting this Thanksgiving, I’ve got the perfect way to “break the ice” and get us all talking- the Grandparent Talk game from Around The Table Games.

Grandparent Talk is 100 cards held together with a sturdy clip, and on each card is a question designed to get Grandparents talking about their lives. Grandparent Talk is designed to help deepen intergenerational relationships among family members and keep family history alive. Children might be surprised at how much they have in common with their Grandparents. Here are sample questions:

  • What kind of toys did you have?
  • What kinds of pets did you have? What were their names?
  • What is the scariest thing that has ever happened to you?

Here’s a link to Retail Locations where you can buy Grandparent Talk and other Around the Table Games like Family Talk and Family Talk 2.   This game would be an excellent gift for Grandparents or a purchase to make to keep around the house for when Grandparents visit (or if you are a Grandparent, for when the Grandkids visit). You might even want to videotape the answers to the questions for a video family history!

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My mashed potato disaster

November 7, 2008 By

In 2006, Chris and I hosted members of both of our families for Thanksgiving dinner. Chris used our Betty Crocker cookbook to come up with a delicious herb rub for the turkey, which turned out beautifully, as you can see from the photo, and tasted delicious. We had crescent rolls, and stuffing, and Chris’ Grandma’s sweet potato casserole, and everything turned out really well, except for one thing-the mashed potatoes.

See, despite having been 39 years old at the time, I had never actually made homemade mashed potatoes. I know! I always bought the instant kind, but for Thanksgiving dinner, especially my first Thanksgiving dinner, I wanted to make homemade potatoes. I peeled, cut, and boiled the potatoes, drained them, and put them in a bowl. I broke them up with a fork, then dumped in butter and milk and turned on my electric hand mixer. And you know what I got?

GLUE. See, when cooked, potatoes are very starchy. And when that starch mixes with COLD MILK AND BUTTER (yes, I know now, you are supposed to bring them to room temp first), that potato starch turns to glue. Fortunately, I had a box of instant potatoes in the pantry which I made instead, and no one minded one bit. It could have been a disaster!

If you have any questions about how to cook a turkey this year, you can call 1-800-BUTTERBALL to virtually talk turkey with their holiday meal preparation experts, or visit Butterball.com for Web chats with a few bloggers we all know and love – Chris Jordan (Notes from the Trenches), Susan Wagner (Friday Playdate), and Roxanna Missong (Miguelina) on November 11, 18 and 25 from 11 a.m.-1 p.m. CST. They’ll answer all your turkey related questions.

But take it from me, if you attempt homemade mashed potatoes, please let the butter and a measuring cup of milk come to room temperature before adding them to your potatoes. Unless you want to serve a bowl of glue.

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by Butterball.

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