after party messes

Whew! What a weekend. I often actually look forward to Mondays these days. The girls and I are going to do laundry (Monday is laundry day) and convalesce. Poor Rivers has been sick. She needs some love and attention from her Momma. We did a lot this weekend. And since Sundays are the only days that Brian doesn't study, we seem to pack waaaay too much into them.

After this evening's festivities, of which I'm sure you will see pictures in the near future, I was sweeping up pumpkin seeds, tootsie roll wrappers, more leaves from the back porch, candy corn and count chocula cereal, the dishes were piled up in the sink and on the counters, the girls were finally in bed after being up much too late, and I was thinking about how I actually don't mind after-party-messes so much. I think about all the fun we had and the memories made and the happy people entertained, and the mess seems almost like a pleasure to clean up. Tonight I thought of the grandest of all after-party-messes at the end of my father's 50th birthday party. My sisters, Amy and Crystal, and I decided to throw my dad a party. It was a surprise that he knew about, but he didn't know just how big it really was. It was huge. And very fun with lots of friends and family and letters from long-ago buddies. The after-party-mess filled Amy's counters and table and spilled rather enormously onto her floor, where the three of us sat almost giddy with exhaustion and the emotional high of a highly planned for and very successful party. We were finishing off the baked brie, which tasted even better sitting indian style on a dirty kitchen floor than it had outside on the back lawn in beautiful fall weather. The ginormous chocolate birthday cake made in grand wedding cake proportions was still the size of a very large normal birthday cake even after we'd given a lot away. So we did what any not-so-normal-sane person would do and decorated it with leftover dip and smoked salmon. The little smoked salmon flag flapping on the cake stabilizing skewer was the best part. Then we took it into the living room to show my brother and our cousin, almost dropping it with our unreasonable amount of laughter. Then we marched it out the door and ceremoniously threw it over the fence and down the hill where it kind of plopped and slid rather unspectacularly. Good times. Amy thinks that the women in our family are rather crazy, but I say that when she joined the family she just fanned on the craziness like the Santa Anas on a So Cal wildfire. Anyway, I enjoy life's great parties even if they do generate life's great messes.