My Son's "Old Goat" Turning 30 Birthday Party

 It was my oldest son Jeff's 30th birthday a few days ago. I wanted to do something cool for
 the BIG 30.  He keeps posting goats bleating and running around on Youtube to his Facebook page.  It is hilarious. So I put two and two together. Let's have a GOAT PARTY!

Here I am playing my Pin the Tail on the Goat game with my granddaughters......Marisa thought it was fun. I don't know if the adults had fun...but hey, life is what you make of it, right? 

 I made a nice roast beef and mashed potatoes and gravy dinner with homemade rolls.

Yummy dinner rolls....the recipe is on my cooking blog The Weekday Chef. HERE is the link.  Check them out. They are deeeelish! 

Here's the goat I made for the game....and here are all the tails. 

Tiff getting spun around before she pins her tail on the goat.....lol...

I think everybody played.....

Gary's always a good sport....he gets into competition. And he won! I had a big package of tools for a prize. 

Meg and Marisa getting ready to take their turns...aren't they so cute? 

The 3 munchkins. 

All the little girls loved playing Pin the Tail on the Goat!  I think Meg won while admitting she could see through the blindfold. We gave her a big bubble wand for a prize anyway.

My daughter Tiff made him a Goat Bundtcake. It was delicious! Loved the goat decoration too. :D  

The kids raided one of their farm toys to get this goat for the cake.....

Old Goat cake.....with chocolate chips inside. Oh yummy! 

Jeff blowing out his "candle" since I forgot to buy birthday candles....oops....

Here is Jeff's big box of crackers to go with his goat cheese, and I got him some car wash tools and a hand sprayer for carwashing too. He just got a new little red car so that will help him keep it in pristine shape. It's a little red hot rod.

Have YOU ever had a goat party with your own goat cake? Well then you haven't been really living, have you? 

Here was my goat  Clipart from Squidoo for doing a Pin the Tail on the Goat Game.....hehehe...

With the goat cheese I made an onion dip for our chips and added the goat cheese to the dip. It's just okay. I'm not a super fan of goat cheese. But it was funny. And nobody noticed a weird flavor in the onion dip or anything.

This is something you CAN do with goat cheese that tastes okay...onion dip for potato chips. 

Nobody really loved the goat cheese.....must be an acquired taste...

Goat cheese and onion soup dip mix...it was pretty good...

So I printed the goat up Funny One at Picgifs, and I made the Pin the Tail on the Goat game by looking at the picture while I drew.  After we ate dinner and played the goat game, we went out and blew Megan's prize bubbles, we  played Loaded Questions, (my favorite game) and then we opened presents.

We got him a shirt from our trip to Yellowstone....

 I remember when I turned 30. I had 4 kids already, my youngest, Danny was only 6 months old. I think my hubs got me a motorcycle, and one of the boys got me a blue metal baseball bat...It may have been Jeff. He was really into baseball at the time.....snicker......

And I remember my 47th birthday, 17 years later when we all went to Marie Callendars and had lunch and pie in a hurry so my youngest son, Danny could get to his job at the movie theaters on time. So much has changed in 7 years. But birthdays, I'm glad, have not. We honor and celebrate every single one in our family. I think it is important to make memories.

Jeff's shirt, car wash doo dads, big bag of crackers and a bunch of goat cheese for fun. He didn't like the goat cheese. But he did take the crackers home. Funny boy. He is very hard to buy for. Unless it is some kind of gun or ammunition. :D Sometimes I get it right.  Most of the time not. :O

Prizes for the Pin the Tail on the Goat Game....everybody got candy, and the winners got cool prizes. 

 This year we got Jeff a reservation to The Homestead for this winter time, to take his family on a little trip. It's a place where he likes to go swim in the underground hot pot crater, the natural spring there. It's a cool place.

If you've never visited THE CRATER, it's one of the greatest pools in America....I love it there.

The Homestead will be a fun outing for their family. 

Little Miss Josie was so cute singing Happy Birthday to her daddy. I had to record
 it. She is such a little doll. 

Josie singing happy birthday to daddy. So cute!

And Megan got in on the singing too. She loves birthday parties. 

We have always made birthdays a HUGE deal in our family. I wonder if they are all getting too old for birthday parties? I don't know. I just know it is fun for me, the mom, to celebrate my kids and their special days. I hope it is always a good memory for them. And lets them know how much I love them. :D Just like they love their own kids.

Garden Dinner Party

My neighbor, Linda, had a beautiful garden party last night at her house in the early evening. Everybody was supposed to bring their favorite garden harvest in some kind of yummy dish.

Pretty fall colors in the napkins on the table. 

We had everything from cucumber dip to peach pie to zuchini casserole to homemade strawberry jam and homemade dinner rolls.  (I made the homemade rolls!) It was all so fun and so delicious!

Yummy fruit salad. 

I think this was a peach crisp. 

I took a few of these plums home for the hubs to taste. They were simply incredible! Sooooo sweet! 

Aren't these cucumbers so cute with their curly cuts? 

These carrot cake bars were yummy too. I tried one! 

This fresh, homemade salsa was really yummy! I had some! 

And she has such a lovely yard. I wandered around taking shots of this and that.

This was a pretty pond full of lilly pads and koi surrounded by flowers and plants. It had a waterfall we could hear all night 

Pretty fall pumpkins and fall leaves were the decorations everywhere. 

Here was the garden party all set up behind her house. 

Flowers were lining the horse corral all around. So pretty! 

My grandkids would go nuts in her yard. It is like a wonderful park. She even has horses and a big garden out back.

 Her hubs made a climbing wall for the kids and a zip line too. I would never want to leave if I was 8 years old!

  There was even a giant sand pit for kids and a volleyball court! Why would you want to go anywhere else?

Table decor was really nice. 

 She had pumpkins growing in her garden as well as corn, squash, zuchini, all sorts of tomatoes and other yummy veggies.  She even had a greenhouse. There were 2 acres filled with great things.

I loved this picturesque shot of the back side of her yard with the neighbor's A frame house in the distance. 

She got raspberry bushes from the same neighbor that shared her raspberry bushes with me. 

I got this great picture of their horse grazing in the back field. What a beauty. 

We had a great time eating, talking, and laughing till the sun went down. Then she had some speakers come and talk about gardens.

Baked brie cheese in a puff pastry with raspberry filling. It was to die for! 

I tasted this stuffed zuchini with sausage, tomatoes and cheese too. It was great. 

Gotta have some chili! 

I had some of this veggie dish too. The white sauce was yummy as were the mushrooms. 

Somebody made zuchini bread of course....gotta use those zuchinis up, right?  

We even had a few dudes who showed up to share garden stories! 

Mostly it was a gals garden party. 

I've done progressive dinner garden parties in the past. That is a lot of fun too because then you get to SEE so many pretty gardens and you get new ideas for your own. Each host gave a little instructional snippet about something they grow or an area of flowers that they've had great success with, or something like that.

She had tons of tall pine trees that blocked out the last of the sun. It was the perfect time of night and perfect weather. 

More pretty decoration....

Here are my homemade dinner rolls in a pretty fall ceramic bowl....

Another pretty bowl....loved it....

Spring greens salad with strawberries 

 Did I mention we had lots of great salads? All kinds of veggie and fruit salads were spread all over the tables. I tried a few and they all were awesome.

Fresh raspberries in this salad with spinach too...

I had fun talking my brains out to all my friends in the neighborhood of course.....under all these great pine trees! 

It was a great evening. And what a great theme party idea it was too!