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Yesterday, Mr. Al, Holly and I hosted a game day at our clubhouse for all of the neighborhood kids who’ve been trapped at home because of all the snow we had.

It was all Mr. Al’s brainstorm. He sent out an email to gauge interest and Holly and I jumped on the bandwagon. He went and got ingredients, made up SIX batches of pizza dough and had everything ready for the arriving kiddos.

I brought tons of games from my closet, including the Texas Hold-em paraphernalia. And we brought out the ping pong table.

Mr. Al got the kids started with making homemade chocolate chip cookies. They had a blast! All the measuring and flying flour and secret snatches of chocolate chips. Delightful.

Mr. Al’s cookie baking venture was a huge success and with all those kids in the house they were snatched up like a bunch of feeding vultures. I’ll tell ya, teenagers get hungry! So Al got the pizza making started.

We had a group of about five or six girls who were really into the baking process and it was as if they were running their own little restaurant. Ingeniously, since it takes a while to spread dough, sauce and cheese, and then bake a real pizza, they came up with a quickie pizza idea to hold over the masses.

They took flour tortillas and spread them with sauce, and covered them lightly with cheese, then microwaved them for one minute. They cut them, set them out and they were GONE in a flash. They looked disgusting to me, kind of like wimpy little pizzas, but those kids loved them. The teenagers at my table dubbed them ‘tortizzas’.

Cade was so happy because his old friend, Jack, agreed to play his Axis and Allies game. And he also played Stratego with a new friend. We were hoping somebody would be into these kind of games.

I was quickly grabbed to deal for the multitudes of teenagers who wanted to play poker. It is becoming my station in life to deal in the poker games. It’s great because I’ve come to learn so much about the kids that are older than Cade. And you know what? I like them. They’re good kids. I had so much fun with them.  At one point I had eleven teenagers ringed around my table. And we all got to practice our math skills, but don’t tell them that…LOL!

Cade came over for the poker playing when he finished his games. He is fast becoming an accomplished little player. Twice, when threatened by an older teenager with an “all in” bet, Cade called and won the hand. There was lots of cheering and fist bumping going on and he gained a lot of respect. One of the girls was even asking Cade to guide her during the game because she had never played and didn’t trust the other teenagers.

We set the back room up with a movie, Tinkerbell, for the little kids. Surprisingly, some of the teenagers came in and watched it too. I think teenagers enjoy the chance to remember the things from their past that were so much fun.

After a long bout with the poker players, I decided to go over and play Bananagrams with some of the moms and kids. We had six players at one point. It was so much fun and everyone was learning spelling and vocabulary from each other. Great fun.

It took hours of baking to get all the pizza dough used up and only a few slices remained at the end of the day; along with a tremendous mess. After five hours at the club house, the kids started to trickle on home. It took those of us left about half an hour to clean up from all that baking. But when 50 something kids show up, and everyone has a good time, I’d say your spontaneous event could be considered a success.

I’m just a little worried that the moms in the neighborhood are going to want this to be an ongoing tradition whenever it snows……hmmmm.

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