Garden Parties

Last week's housewarming was fun - not to mention educational. We had about 65 of our favorite people over - And I spent the first two hours walking people around the house, before I ran into something brilliant... Friends I had given the tour to were taking up the slack and giving tours. It was great. I thought, "Hmmmm." So I started sending people upstairs on their own, telling them, "look inside any open door..." It was great. It left me a minute to actually go into the back yard and see who was there...

Note. I have to tell you that I like nothing more than entertaining in my home... But when there are a ton of people, I have what I call "Host Anxiety." What happens is I flit - I try to take care of the pressing needs like "Kelly, where's the beer?" "Kelly, Can you show me the Love Shack?" "Kelly, What's up with Dave?" Things like that... (Incidentally, Dave got paged and actually had to leave his own party to go fix something at work. He wasn't supposed to have the pager - but his boss had to go to a conference, so he got it...) (Poor Dave - but thankfully, he was only gone an hour)

Back to me - and my hostess anxiety. I find that when I"m in the midst of a bunch of people who don't necessarily know each other, I have to make sure they know they have things in common, so I introduce them like this. "Hi, Alex, this is Judy. She works at the golf club where we held our last corporate dinner..." "Hi, Terry, this is Dan. You two have been married for fifteen years..." "Hi, Jill, this is Carolyn. We all have the same trainer..." Things like that. The problem is, I invited a lot of people that I haven't been able to spend much time with lately... so it was kind of hard not to be able to sit with them for awhile... But a good hostess flits, so flit I did...

One of my guests had given me a lilac to plant in my backyard. I was excited to tell her that it was doing well, so I brought her to the place in the yard that I planted it... My mistake was not telling Dave I planted a lilac in the yard. Despite the fact that I'm fairly certain he'd watched me water it on occasion, he actually broke it off, thinking it was one of those pesky black walnut trees that grow wildly around... All that was left was about two feet of branch sticking out of the yard. It was kind of embarassing.

Donna was gracious though, and simply said, "Mine didn't make it either." Yeah, I thought, "Yours died a peaceful death. MINE WAS MURDERED!!!!

Ok. So I've come up with a short list of things I believe would make me have less hostess anxiety.

1) Less people. I think I would rather host a party of ten where I can spend more time with people and less time managing beverages.

2) Get organized. For this party, all I said was, "I'm providing burgers, dogs, wine, and beer. Bring a snack to share." I have more bags of half eaten chips than anyone I know. It's CarbFest at Kell's...

3) Kids. I may do a no-kids-party next time. All I can say is that I thought I was doing well. I put a DVD on, and left, only to find the strangest series of reprogrammed satellite issues... I had to reload the satellite software the other night, and I'm pretty sure I'm recording the next twelve seasons of "Fairly Odd Parents..." sigh.

That's all I can think of for now - Do you guys have any advice for this budding Martha Stewart?