Prepping for New Year's Eve

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Well, we're in the holiday home stretch!

We have our final party tonight...a New Year's Eve Open House. We've invited family, friends and neighbors, and here's the plan:

• An easy spaghetti dinner at 6, with slow-cooked meatballs, salad and homemade garlic bread. I usually make the meatballs in a crockpot, but it's still at someone's house from a party! I'll have to use the stove top - hope they come out right!


• LOTS of board games: DDR, Clue FX (sooooo fun), Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, Scrabble, Sorry, Jenga, Probe, Boggle, Yahtzee, Battleship. We have different games going on in each room. And, the dining room table is also extended so we can have a game at each end.


• 4,000 Questions: I once found a book called "4,000 Questions for Getting to Know Anyone and Everyone." We LOVE this book and use it often. I put the questions on little slips of paper and leave them out in baskets. Then, anyone can pull out a question to ask anyone else any time. The questions are interesting and usually lead to discovering some interesting tidbit about someone that we didn't previously know - we even discover new things about family members!


• Cheese Fondue with bread cubes, potato chunks, broccoli spears, and apple slices.


• Chocolate Fondue later, with marshmallows, pretzels, pound cake, and orange segments.


• Cupcakes: I was inspired by A Baked Creation blog to make New Year cupcakes - yellow cake with chocolate frosting, and "2009" standing up in the frosting, made from piped white chocolate.

And, of course, we'll have a midnight toast with champagne and sparkling juice as we watch the ball drop in Times Square.

Then, my daughter will have 4 friends sleeping over! And, New Year's Day will be spent cleaning up and getting organized for 2009 (I know...fun, right?).