Celebrating A Century - Happy Birthday Mom & Dad

Although my parents were born in different years, my Dad was only 9 days older than my mom. Dad was born on December 29th 1918 and Mom was born on January 7, 1919.

Since it has been 100 years since their births, my siblings and I wanted to celebrate that triumphant event by throwing a birthday bash for them. We decided to hold it on Friday, January 4th - between both of their birthdays so as not to favor one parent over the other.

Kent and Ann agreed to host it at their house since they are the most centrally located of all of us. Alan and I flew up early Friday morning so we could be there in plenty of time to join in on the festivities. 

All seven of us and our spouses were able to attend.

(bottom row: Ann, Kathryn, Joan, Janice, Gayle, Lynda, Jane; 

top row: Kent, Phil, Alan, Leonard, Scott, Neal, and Ken)

We had a great time together. The first thing we did was have a great meal. Kent & Ann provided the meat (barbecued pork tenderloin) and the potatoes (Garlic mashed). Both were excellent. Gayle provided rolls, Janice provided a salad, Neal and Phil provided fruit, and Jane and I provided the dessert. Everything tasted great. 

With full tummies, we played a game that Phil taught us called "Three Buck Chuck". This is a game none of us had played before except for Phil and Kathryn.

Rules: Everyone starts with 3 one dollar bills. This is what you do with your dollar bills when it is your turn to roll the dice (you roll as many die as dollars you have in your stack)

Eventually, the dollar bills end up in the pot and the last person standing wins the whole pot. For Phil, who won, that meant he ended up winning $42. Not bad. Alan almost won, but he rolled a 4 so we had to start the game over again. That way, we got to play it twice.

After that, we gathered in the family room to play a game I put together.

Prior to the party, I had e-mailed everyone to ask them to tell me one thing they learned from Dad (Paul) and one thing they learned from Mom (Lois). I printed up all the answers and then everyone had to guess who said what. It was a lot of fun.

We started with Mom and this shows the correct answers on the left:

Then we did the same thing for Dad. Here are the answers:

Kent won round one about Mom with 7 correct answers. Pretty amazing. For round two about Dad, there was a tie at 5 correct answers each between Janice and Kent (again). The prize was a $10 Amazon gift card. Kent ended up with two of them. It's good that I had brought three gift cards in case there was a tie.

This game kind of led into us doing a lot of sharing of stories and reminiscing about growing up as the children of Paul and Lois Burton. We each have so many fond memories about growing up at the Power Plant. We were definitely "free range" children living in a pretty dangerous place. I'm surprised we all survived long enough to reach adulthood. I have talked about this in a previous post (August 3, 2015) so I won't reiterate here.

I love each one of my siblings as well as the remarkable individuals they each married. We all get along splendidly, so it is such a pleasure to spend time socializing with them. I wish we could get together more often. Who knows how much longer it will be before one of us is called home. I dread that day, but know it will happen eventually.