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Saturday, July 12, 2008

Winding down

I love the culmination of anything. Case in point, the little boy's birthday party.
If you have been reading along, I tend to get carried away with plans of what I'm going to do. Everything starts out so grandiose in my creative mind, then reality sets in. The husband doesn't come home from work on time and doesn't call to let me know when to expect him, the dog needs to go out more often than normal, errands take twice as long as planned, the baby won't take his naps and all creative plans fly out the window. The bright side, and the part I love the most, everything still comes together, I'm usually a whirling dervish trying to get done the absolute essentials(in this case, the birthday cake) but everything does come together. Sure it's less grand than anticipated but I'm the only one who knows how grand that truly was and there's always next time. My 35th birthday party was a prime example of this, I had truly remarkable images of what it could be. It wasn't the image in my mind's eye but it was well worth the effort and memorable I would think to many of our guests. Same with our wedding 3 years ago. In that case, we were tight on cash so I had to do WAY more than I would ever take on again (feeding 35 people when you are also the bride probably not the brightest of ideas!!) But the reality of that day was many of our 35 guests commented on how wonderful our wedding was and that it was one of the nicest they had attended to date. Not because it was over the top but because it was down to Earth, accessible and heartfelt. The handmade aspect was minimal but added to the overall simplicity and lets be honest, allowed us to keep our costs down.(our entire wedding and honeymoon cost us less than $1500)It also allowed us to offer a menu we could not have afforded to get catered. We served Cantonese BBQ pork, tri colored asian slaw, dim sum, rice, vegetarian spring rolls and they were all homemade and very, very yummy! Basically what I'm saying is what's essential is what ends up coming together and all that extraneous stuff falls by the wayside. The same will be said of my little one's birthday party, but truth be told he is the most important part of the day (and the best thing I ever made and we all know I really had very little to do with that, I was basically a condo for 9 months)!