On Wednesday I blogged about de-stressing after a stressful work day. Those things, in my opinion, are to be done sparingly so you don’t become a couch sloth like yours truly. But today I’m writing to tell you about a weekly ritual I do to keep me sane: game night. The key with game night is we don’t do it on the weekend, we do it on a weeknight. There’s no point in waiting to do everything until the weekend! The work week can be fun too, you just have to put in a little effort.
You see, I refuse to adhere to the idea that we only get two of seven days to live our best lives. This “Thank God it’s Friday!” thing leaves us constantly chasing a ball we keep kicking down the field. Me? I like to enjoy my ball here and now. I’m going to enjoy at least 80% of my life. I’m not settling on 28%. That’s bullshit and you know it.
So, once a week we have a game night of sorts at our house. (Okay, that’s a lie, sometimes it’s at another friend’s house but more so than not it’s at ours.) It’s a day that I can reliably count on to let everything else go for a few hours. If I’m playing Dutch Blitz, there’s no time to worry about Lola, work, or how long I can procrastinate grocery shopping until Ryan just leaves me for a more domestic goddess. Game night I get to just be carefree Samm that only has one problem and one problem only: everyone around me cheats at Settlers of Catan and that is just not freaking fair.
Last night we had Isaac and Kristie over for game night. Isaac is a long time bestie, someone I met my freshman year of college and told me I reminded him of this. (For some reason I didn’t run the other way.) I introduced him to Ryan, and they lived happily ever after until Ryan and I got our very own happily ever after. He’s our third wheel and we love him for it. Kristie was my roommate, my partner in crime, and right hand woman at my wedding. Her and I are totally opposite in some ways, and exactly the same in some. She is my soul mate.
In order to keep them entertained and loving me the way that I love them, I fed them. Target is full of all things cute and Valentine’s Day themed this time of year, so I decided to grab some dollar spot finds and make our game night extra special. We had cupcakes from an earlier celebration from Cupcake! our local cupcake paradise, so decided to feed them to our friends last night too.
Cupcakes, garland, and virgin mimosas, does this excite you as much as it excites me? Because it should.
- Minimum one friend that you tolerate
- Drinkable liquids that don’t taste horrible
- A menu of games so your guest(s) can feel like they have options
- Pretzels, because everyone loves pretzels
- Candy, because everyone loves candy and a sugar rush never hurt no one. Except diabetics.
- Decor, candy for their eyes
- A smile to remind everyone you’re having a good time, and to guilt them out of leaving early
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