it's great to be a florida gator...

About a month ago (wow, I'm so behind!), we had our family Gator Party!  The last time we were able to host a Gator party was back in 2009.  We've tried every year since to make it happen, but Saturdays in the fall are always busy and this was the first year that we could party Gator-style again!  The two most important elements to any Gator football party (besides the actual game), are the boiled peanuts-which I failed to take a picture of, but which were delish, and the real-life football field in our backyard.

Of course, we had to decorate with all of our Gator paraphernalia, and lots of orange and blue!

Kade and Ky decorated the awesome cake, and Bart brought his gator head home from his office for the weekend.

Field painted? Check. Blue and orange treats out? Check. Decorations up? Check.  Now it was time to party.  We had lots of friends over, even though none of them are true Gator fans, they were nice enough to come and party with us, and help us cheer on our team!

I made these yummy cupcakes, and tried a new frosting recipe.  It's from my friend Melanie's cooking blog, and it is seriously life-changing!  I've made lots of frosting in my life, and this one is better than any other recipe by far.

Also, when I was looking on Amazon.com for something fun for our Gator party, I found this awesome Jell-o mold kit.  It's kinda hard to tell in the photo, but these are little Gator head logos made out of Jell-o!  I seriously put these on the table, turned around 45 seconds later and they were all gone!  Apparently Gator Jell-o is a big hit with the kids!
At half-time, we held our own football game!  The kids go crazy playing on the "real" football field!

At some point, the costumes came out, and Kade is a Gator fan/football player/some-kind-of-super hero

It was such a fun party, made even better by the fact that the Gators beat Tennessee 31-17!  It's great to be a Florida Gator!