I love throwing parties. It really started years ago with our annual pumpkin party and has grown to dinner groups, 4th of July bashes and then a few weeks ago, Hadley and Bode convinced me to invite a bunch of their church friends over for a night of movies, pizza and ghosts in the graveyard.
For Labor Day, the kids and I thought it would be fun to get some people together to do a pancake-eating-contest-breakfast so sent an email to some families to see if they were in town. Most of them were and so our house was flooded with eight Mormon families. If you’ve seen ‘em you know they have a lot of kids, which translates into a lot of fun.
Pancake Par-tay
Some of the men-folk
The women-folk
Last fall, the kids participated in their first pie-eating contest. Though the experience was hilarious, eating an entire pie was over-the-top so we thought doing the same challenge with a few pancakes would be a lot more feasible.
Here’s my sordid history with pancake-eating. When I was a wee Canadian lassie, my two brothers and I were very competitive. Oh wait, nothing has changed. So, one Saturday we challenged each other to a contest to see who could the most pancakes. For once in my life, I dominated, even beating out my brother who was four years my senior. I don’t remember how many I ate.
But I do remember how many I threw up afterward and it was All. Of. Them.
No lie: I couldn’t eat pancakes for 10 years after that.
For our First Annual Labor Day Pancake Contest Eating Party, the ladies went first. Yes, you will note my daughter is the only one who chose not to cover up her clothes.
Apparently, her strategy worked because she won.
Though I’m not sure if she looked like a winner.#She’sGonnaBlow
I had high hopes for the boys. Bode has an awesome group of friends so imagine my shock/dismay when I learned several of them had already started eating and didn’t want to participate.
“I prefer to eat with a fork,” said his friend Noah. What 8-year-old boy even says that?
I practically had to drag the few remaining boys down there but they sure loved it once they dove in.
Though Bode put in a good effort, his friend Carson barely beat him and even had a smile on his face doing it.
We had an all-you can-eat category and my friend Eva’s teen Rory dominated by eating something like 17 pancakes. Sadly, I did not photograph the evidence, probably because he was passed out in a corner somewhere.
We have invited a new family in our ward to several of our recent fetes and the father Craig commented to me how cool it was that we regularly open up our home as a place for all these people to come together for fun and chaos. “The party people” he called us, which kind of took me aback because it’s what we’ve always done. Growing up, my parents made our home into the place where our friends would congregate and it’s funny because Jamie once received a similar blessing that our home would be a “happy place, where our children love to bring their friends.”
I responded to Craig that it was important for me to have my kids build relationships with their church friends and I wanted to provide many extracurricular opportunities for them to have good, clean fun. I had fabulous neighborhood friends growing up and I’m still close with all of them. But during the teenager years, like many teens, they experimented with a lot of wild things and being the designated driver grew tiresome. Of course, I want my kids to have friends in all walks of life but there’s nothing like having friends who share your same morals and values.
Like stuffing your face with pancakes.
I'm a Canadian-born mom of two, former Denver Post columnist, family travel writer, editor of MileHighMamas.com and 9News contributor. Expert on all things Utah, Denver, family and travel. Lover of laughter and life. Happily married to a man obsessed with growing The Great Pumpkin. 