Friday, February 16, 2018

Goofy Grandpa's and Grandma's Christmas parties (separately)

My dad always comes up with some unique/cool/strange gift idea for all the grandkids.  2 years ago, he made an awesome matchbox race car track (resembling a pinewood derby track) and gave each family like 75 cars.  The kids spent the entire evening racing their cars (and we lucked out and got to keep the track).  Last year, every grandson got a RC car that could battle the other cars.  Then he added a photo of each kid's face and taped it on the RC car.  This year, he came over to our house around noon (we were hosting) to start setting up his gift.  He bought a marble roller coaster for each family and then spent the next 5 hours (Yes, you read that correctly) with Kevin setting up all the tracks in one long run.  It started at the top of our stairs, went down the stairs into the basement, down the race car track, and ended with the marble in a bowl.  They had to tape, hang strings from the ceiling to hold the track up.....it was absolutely crazy.  Turns out that marbles are super finicky on a track that has to go DOWN a flight of stairs!  They literally finished about 5 minutes before everyone came over.  My kids had the most fun going up an =d down the stairs testing out the track- probably for 2 hours or more straight.  All the cousins thought it was really cool and tested it out right away.  But I'm afraid the track broke within the first 10-15 min.  I think my dad and Kevin were so tired that they didn't even care at that point (Kevin even had to take a short nap at the beginning of the party because he had such a bad headache).
In addition, my dad also got each of the kids a Corvette t-shirt...which is funny since we got him a Corvette t-shirt from all of us! :)




My mom's party was the very next night.  She hosted it at her house.  While my dad always orders pizza for his party, my mom always does a nicer dinner.  

We played a couple games (and had a short spiritual message and video).

We opened presents.


Corbin immediately wanted to open his present (shrinky dinks)....

and cousins joined in.

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