Xoe and Xanthe joined the Volleyball team. I'm so proud of them. They've had some pretty intense conditioning. This game was their first and the blue and gold t-shirts are all the American girls and the orange t-shirts are the Germans. We had to play different tournaments and some were against our own teams. It was really fun but these make for some long Saturdays. Great job girls!
The girls had a really hard time choosing a theme for their party (cuz every party has to have a theme right? haha. I guess a Schultz-inspired party does!)
Xoe came up with the theme of "Glow" so we went with it. Brian had left the week of the party to Italy and I was left alone with freezing cold weather (10 degrees in the middle of the day) and a frozen car battery. Luckily a friend of mine helped me pick up Brian's car on the base so I used that the whole week but it made for some pretty funny running around cuz i didn't have enough room in his small car.
We started off with these fun invitations. I totally channeled my high school publicity days. Xoe came up with a great idea of using puffy paint (after our failed attempts at Gel pens and glow-in-the-dark paper didn't work). It was really fun and I think the girls were impressed with my puffy paint skills (come on! It takes a lot of practice to work puffy paint. The air bubbles that blow out and traveling over the other paint. :) I got me some mad puffy paint skills, I guess. At one point, Xanthe gave up out of frustration and was impressed when I told her every mess up can be fixed! haha)
I had Xanthe take pictures of a bunch of things and she got some great ones but they were all kind of close up. So there aren't any of the whole room. We also took some on our iphones so they are kind of poor quality. I had a hard time getting pictures in the dark. None of these pictures captured the degree of how bright everything was glowing and how cool things were.
I bought a long black light and a black lightbulb to go into a lamp Remember all our lamps here have to be European specs meaning different sizes as the American lamps and they range from extremely small to large... Brian is always having difficulty finding lights for our house with different bases, wattage, etc. And don't forget the different plugs, so imagine my difficulty with feeling confident in my skills of the electrical hookups. But I did it! :) And nothing blew up!
We had a candy table that had glass jars with fun bright candy. When I found out Tide Laundry Detergent (and I think any blueish detergent would work too) glowed, we started painting everything blue! I painted the outsides of all the glass bowls with the detergent so they would glow. Then the girls' friend Christine snuck on the bus home with them to help setup and when we found out the white table didn't glow, she had the funnest time drizzling the laundry soap all over. (I didn't get a good picture of the whole thing but look at the next picture of the table underneath the candy.)
The candy table with oreo brownies, rice krispy treats and their cupcake cake (all of which I thought would glow with the white frosting but didn't).
There was just no way to capture how cool everything looked. The posters glowed, all the glass was glowing, the lemonade and jello were glowing (I used tonic water which glows), and we had informed everyone to wear white or neon so they would glow in the dark too.
The presents are starting to gather.
When everyone arrived, we turned off the lights and they started a dance party! At first (as you'll see in this video, they hadn't put on their glow gear yet!) We had glowing hula hoops, 80's dance music (thanks to Scott Schultz) and a bunch of crazy girls! This video was right at the beginning before they all started getting crazy. :)
Katie Peters
Christine Arnold
Katryn Brown, Grace Campana, Katie Peters
Then Xoe had planned a Just Dance Competition. She put a bunch of songs from the two Wii Just Dance disks we have and they had to pick out of a hat what they would do.
This video cracked me up. It was all of them doing one last dance before games, cake and opening presents. I loved that they knew the chorus and sang along with it. I jumped in about halfway to record it. Too funny!
The rest of the pictures are from Cake Time, Open Presents, "Water Straw" Game, "Reap What You Sow" Game, Board Games and rubberband balloons.
Xanthe & Xoe making a wish
Relighting Sparkler Candles (pretty cliche but how could we not when we were having a GLOW party?)
Playing volleyball with a beach ball (a bunch of them are all on the volleyball team together)
New iPod for Xanthe that she has been begging for for weeks, leaving hints for and making serious negotiations for. This scooter is not like the regular Razor scooters. It's got like a "peace sign" design to stand on and you move it side to side and it goes super fast. Xoe has been asking for this since October and probably forgot I remembered. We had to pay in Euro so it was much more expensive than I wanted to spend but I had no other ideas for big presents. Too bad it was so freezing cold to ride.
The long straws I bought (that actually glowed surprisingly).
Xoe's Instagram pictures
The things I didn't get pictures of were all the girls sleeping in that room with mattresses brought down from every room and breakfast the next morning. It was super fun. We're sad Timarie, Marissa, Zaria and Morgan couldn't be there. We missed you guys!
So-- Consensus: It was a hit and I really think the adults need to have a Glow Party. It was such a blast and I was having my own "old people" party in the other room reliving all the music they were listening to. Stacy Q, Freakazoid, Tainted Love, Supersonic, Just Can't Get Enough (not Black Eyed Peas, but Depeche Mode), Fly Girl, Fantasy Girl.... I seriously wish someone had been here to party with me! Let's rock it everyone next time, right?!
