Kiefer Christmas Party

Since all of the Kiefers have family coming into town, we decided to have a Kiefer Christmas Party here in Vegas before it became too crazy. We baked and grilled our own pizzas with an endless variety of toppings.

Carrie made the yummy pizza dough and partially grilled them for us to speed up the process. She will criticize their shape. I thought it simply added personality to our crust! Toppings included marinara and BBQ sauce, grilled chicken, Canadian bacon, sausage . .

 LOTSA mozarella cheese, pesto, artichokes, mushrooms . . .

 spinach leaves, tomatoes, garlic, and peppers.

 It was time to get creative!

 Kroc and our little BIG chunker, Calvin.

He is 4 months YOUNGER than Aiyana and they are almost the same size! He has some crazy large genes pulling for him. He's a cutie who is become more interactive and smiley.

 Following pizzas, we made gingerbread houses. Some kits were harder than others . . .

 --Namely mine and Dan's! Apparently, I did not get the memo that this particular brand was the hard-core version. We had no pre-cut base to work with to build our foundation, we had to mix our own frosting (and ended up following Jake and Carrie's lead by using a hot-glue-gun to speed up the process). Of course, while we joked about the difficulty of piecing our gingerbread kit together, Sandra (my mother-in-law) scoffed at us with a short but scolding lecture on how "back in our day, we had to MAKE the gingerbread", etc. We were shamed into loving our gingerbread kit.

 Megan and Ryan entertained Aiya for us, which was awesome. She misses her aunt and uncle's daily attention these days since we moved out.

 Our finished product (which Dan ended up mostly doing himself when I lost interest -- I mean, was caring for our baby . . .  is the one on the right. Yep, the one with the creative chimney! I was pretty impressed with his use of a paper-towel holder.

 Jake and Carrie's (err... LILA'S) masterpiece.

 One of Carrie's nephews started this one. Not sure about the placement of a particular mint . . .

New toys! Poor Aiya has been bored with the same toys at our house because I've been holding out for Christmas. She was so excited to play with something new.

To conclude our Kiefer Party, as with most get-togethers, we said farewell after a delicious dessert. We brought a variety of cookies and cookie dough, some packaged and some fresh from the oven to top with ice-cream. The fancy name is "pizooki". I love saying the name almost as much as I love to eat them!

THE END