Family Feud Birthday

It’s the end of the year.  In teacher lingo, that means some of the fullest weeks of the year.  There is no shortage of tasks on the to do lists around here.  In addition, we’ve already celebrated 11 birthdays in the past 8 months.  All of this added together means that we weren’t about to throw two birthday parties in the last two weeks of classes.  So instead, we went all out with a joint bash for Kami and Lauren.  If we were combining the parties, we knew we needed to come up with something good.  And we outdid ourselves once again.  Since there were two birthdays to be celebrated, it only seemed appropriate to have a battle between the birthday girls.  And since we’re all one big family around here, Family Feud seemed to be the perfect battle to stage.

And in case you’re under the illusion that we spend weeks planning, here’s Jennifer and Rachel finishing up signs five minutes prior to the party.

And so we had the epic battle between the Kemmer family

And the Martin family.

Each family member had a special name, most originating from inside jokes that I won’t bore you with the details of.

Just suffice it to say the names were extraordinarily amusing for all of us.

Sonny had a fully functional gameboard made on powerpoint that allowed us to replicate the game pretty closely.  There were some classic match-ups in the game.  Of course, the first was between the birthday girls themselves.

Between Robb and Mark.

Between the married couples.  The battle to the buzzer between Daren and Jennifer will go down in the annals of team lore.  Jennifer, even with her eyes closed, made it to the buzzer first.  The question was as follows, “100 Chinese students at the university were surveyed on the question what is your hometown?” (Quick sidenote: 100 students actually were surveyed.  Sonny is that insane/awesome when he’s making games.)  Jennifer, after beating Daren to the buzzer, proudly declared, “New York City!”  You see, the previous question was about the job the students would have if they moved to America, so Jennifer had America on the brain.  Needless to say, New York City, being the hometown of none of our students, was not on the board.  Daren got to choose whether to play the question or not.

The final speed round came down to a battle between Kami and Lauren.  Sonny loves to have “equalizer” elements to games, so he allowed the losing family (Kami’s family) to go first in the speed round.  If you know anything about Family Feud, you know that the second person can’t repeat any answers.  So if the first person guesses the number one choice, there’s no chance for you to get as many points.  So basically this was designed to boost up the losing team’s score.  If it sounds like I have an issue with Sonny’s equalizing, you are absolutely correct.  It goes way back several years to our team Amazing Race, in which my team was slaughtering the others until a similar equalizing round.  Sorry, I got distracted.  Back to Kami getting the unfair advantage.

Lauren went second, and although she guessed several of the top answers, she was buzzed for repeating Kami’s answers.

After we all (as in the Kemmer family) griped about the equalizing factor and how it allowed the Martin family to pull ahead, it was time for presents.  There was one team member who shall remain nameless who was a little confused about whose special day it was.

Some presents were well thought out.  Some were just funny.  Everyone loves a Michael Jackson accessory bag.

The party wrapped up with cake, and we continued our trend of awesome parties.

If we ever quit our jobs as teachers, at least we know we have a future in low budget party planning.