Movie Night II: The Quickening

Dudes. I am tired. This weekend we made brunch for the grandmas on Saturday morning, hosted Movie Night 2: Die Harder on Saturday night and then had our Mother's Day picnic on Sunday morning. We leave for Russian River tomorrow morning. It's enough to make even the most fun-lovingest family cry "uncle."

But I'm not here to complain. I'm here to show off my mad Movie Night skillz.

Our movie this year was the Iron Giant which was an awesome choice because GIANT ROBOT.

Here are some of our attractive guests (we had about 50 total because we have no sense of proportion). We just covered the entire backyard with quilts and blankets and pillows and let people spread out as they saw fit.


Here are some more lovely people. Please note the little red bucket filled with glow sticks in the bottom left corner of this photo. They were in the $1 bin at Target so I loaded up thinking the kids would enjoy them. What I'm doing here is called "foreshadowing."


Here is a picture of the beautiful and kind Meredith who deserves better than to have a picture of her with her mouth full posted on the Interwebs, but it's the only picture I have of the food set up. (Forgive me, Meredith! Promise you'll come back again!) Anyway, we did popcorn & chips with the fake nacho cheese kept warm in a fondue pot because I am nothing if not two things: resourceful and high-brow. Josh also grilled Dodger dogs and the kids were presented with an embarrassment of candy options (Red Vines, mini-candy bars, Skittles, M&Ms...you feel me). And, for the grown-ups, a huge selection of beer & wine because there were, like, 25 kids there and that's a lot to deal with sober.


I didn't get a picture of the cupcakes (chocolate, vanilla & red velvet) at the party, but here is a deeply arty one Josh took of the leftovers. The picks are images I found online, printed onto card stock & taped onto toothpicks.


Here you can see the screen set-up. Josh tacked two vinyl shower curtains up under the eaves and wrapped some PVC pipe in the bottom with duct tape. Really worked well and was totally stable. Nice work, Zaz!


Aaaaand here we are about 30 minutes into the movie. All we needed was some techno and we would have been a full-on rave. It descended into pure glow stick anarchy. I'm still finding spent sticks and little connectors all over the house.

So there we have it. Another incredible Movie Night under our belts. This is really my favorite new tradition. Maybe next year we'll set aside an entire weekend to pull this one off, though, instead of trying to cram it into an already crazytown weekend.

Thanks, friends, for all the laughs! Can't wait to do it again!

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Extree, Extree: I didn't get into as much detail about everything this year as I did last, but you can check out that post for more. Here's some supplementary info:

We did these popcorn bags from HEY YO YO, who I use for nearly all of my cupcake/party craziness. Highly recommend!

We did paper food trays (here, but we got ours from Smart & Final.) These are great for eating on a blanket and also are perfect for corralling nacho cheese and Skittles (hopefully not at the same time). Smart & Final is also where we get our Dodger Dogs, aka the world's tastiest dog.

And, in order to avoid another visit from the fuzz, we plastered the 'hood with these fliers (click to embiggen if you'd like to bite the verbiage):