Italian Fest!

Eric has been anxiously awaiting and counting down to this weekend... Italian Fest! Especially since we missed out last year, this year was going to be a good one! It had to be!

We, once again, opened our house and out kitchen for some good Italian cooking! We celebrated the halfway way point to Italian Fest in similar fashion with a more formal dinner party, but we decided to keep this one a little more of an 'Open House' feel, complete with porch dining if you wanted. We has some stuffed shell, which I tried for the first time (turned out great!), and meatball sandwiches. For dessert, we actually had some 'authentic' Italian Fest cannolis, which we bought on Friday night at Italian Fest.

We had a great group of friends over, including neighbors and a mix of Eric's and my individual friends. We all laughed a lot, had some good food and wine, and just enjoyed hanging out. What started out as dinner eventually ended up as a group of us actually heading over to Italian Fest to catch the end of the fun. It's such a fun thing to have in out neighborhood and it's so great to just be able to wander over to enjoy it and not have to plan out an event to go there!

We headed straight for the games, which you wouldn't expect the adults to do, but we figured we might have a little more fun since the carnies would ready to wrap up and move on! And we were kind of right... we walked away, as a group, with three small stuffed animals and a live goldfish. There were many laughs on the way to those prizes! After our full of the bright lights, we wandered over to where all the food vendors were closing up (scored some free breadsticks) and the band was playing their last few songs. There were still a ton of people having a good time... gotta love that!

But the evening ended up back in our backyard for a few final snacks and drinks. Everyone had a blast, but the evening ultimately wore everyone out. So all in all, another successful (and fun) Italian Fest has passed.