The End of the Season

Well, I’m done. All that hand wringing and stress is over with. In celebration, today I am light headed and have a migraine. Oh, and I’m recuperating from Shingles, which I had the honor of contracting 2 weeks ago. What can I say? My driven, perfectionist personality likes to over achieve in everything. If I’m going to stress out, by God I’ll stress out into complete immune system shut down.

And, yet, despite the migraine, dizziness, and white hot knife tickling my bra line, I feel fantastic. I’m done!

Before I return to obsessing about my weight, I thought I might share some pictures of the shower for those who like this sort of thing. (For some reason I love looking at pictures of other people’s parties.)

First up, the invitations…

I wrote the invitation copy, in case you didn’t know I do that sort of thing. I had absolutely nothing to do with the design. I simply emailed my extremely talented friend, Cathe, and gave her a link to Rachel’s nursery bedding and let her do her thing. Cathe is like me and hates to waste paper, so we made use of the blank space and created a small thank-you flat for the mom to be. The entire invitation suite (invite, registry insert, thank you card) fit on one 8.5×11 piece of paper that you could run through your home printer and cut out at your leisure.

Cathe and I have worked together on many, many projects, and if you are looking for custom invitations of any sort, I really can’t recommend Cathe and her shop, Feterie, enough. She’s also on etsy, for those of you who, like me, love to shop indie.

Rachel loves green but is not a fan of pink. I told her, very nicely(!), too bad. Actually, I told her I would keep the pink to a minimum, but in looking at these pictures, I might have broken my promise. Thankfully, she loved it. {NOT my house, by the way…}

The arrangements caused a bit of a problem, but turned out okay. My original plan was a pave of roses, but the vases I purchased from IKEA had too large a mouth. They looked woefully empty even after I stuffed them with 2 dozen roses. Thank God Trader Joe’s is open past 8pm and has a flower department. That’s all I have to say about that.

Cathe also did the favor tags, which I printed out on my printer and cut to size. I used a pink wire ribbon to tie them around a simple 49 flower pot from IKEA that we filled with a plant whose name now escapes me but cost $1.69 for 6. I don’t think the favors cost more than $1.50 each.

The party was supposed to be outside, but when the weather report predicted a triple digit weekend, we said, Oh, Hell no. I knew it would be hot, regardless, so I weeks before the sun decided to descend upon our desert town I planned a menu around food that could sit outside and would be tasty warm, room temperature, or cold. (And also wouldn’t make people sick if it sat out in the sun.) Tarts, salad, and a fruit platter to the rescue. I should have put the strawberries where the pineapples are, but I didn’t plan out my fruit in advance. Live and learn!

My sister in law!

And, of course, the cake! Chocolate ganache, white cake, strawberry mousseline filling (fresh strawberries and a firm buttercream-like mousse). I also served lemon bars on the side since she has craved lemon her entire pregnancy and made use of the fruit left over from lunch by moving it to a smaller platter while everyone played games.

Sorry for the dark image, but you get the idea.

And that is it! After the cake and presents, we cleaned up and I went home. When I got home I (1) took off my shoes, (2) put my hair in a pony tail, (3) scrubbed off my makeup, (4) grabbed my glasses, and (5) read books three and four of the Sookie Stackhouse series.

The end.