boom done

the party is done. i think it was a success. although it was touch and go there at the end. i was really tight on time. the baby sitter did the flowers, which looked great. and as the first guests arrived i ran up stairs with steak on my hands and threw on a dress, a lily pulitzer i just got out of the stored summer clothes). brushed my hair, put on blush and lip gloss and that was that. good thing i had showered earlier! hopefully i did not look too crazed to the guests.
chris was a life saver in the last 30 minutes. he made the sangria, and got all of the hors devours ready. while i finished seasoning the salads and sliced the meat. oh yeah and saved my sauce. remember how i mentioned putting too much dijon, i thought i had gotten enough out, but when i got the sauce out to put on the table, it was green in color but pretty much tasted just like dijon. so i took half, thinned it out with olive oil, called mom in a panic. put more basil and mint and pine nuts and a more lemon juice and it worked out. i guess it was a good thing i had overbought on the herbs!
so we started the party in the backyard. it was a beautiful evening and people seemed happy with the sangria and ate a lot of the hors devours.
then we started dinner, all went smoothly. everyone seemed to like everything. the steak was grilled to perfection (if i do say so myself, in the words of tom blanton, "i nailed it") there is a lot of salad left over, even after sending one guest home with a big tupperware thing of the bulgur wheat salad. so we are planning on having some people over tonight. then i served the cheesecake squares, each with a mint leaf, that zaven had picked off the stems for me, they were a hit, many people had two so that was good. then people stayed and visited and left around 9. it was great having the sitter here. she helped a ton. zaven did great, he is a wonderful host. he greeted the guests and then would say "would you like to join in the back yard?" and then he was out there telling people to try the ginger and cream cheese, the "ginger party" as he calls it. nell fell asleep around 7 and was put in her crib, and zaven and georgia played and visited and we even got zaven to eat a little dinner and go to bed while everyone was still here.
so there were a couple of odd things. there were 6 people of the expected 30 that did not come. one couple did not come because the fellow had resigned from the vestry the day before, but they never called to say one way or the other, another couple came by around 4 pm with 4 bottles of wine to say that they could not make it because their daughter had unexpectedly come to town, and the other couple called at 6:15 to say something about a computer being down at work blah blah blah. whatever.
it was a really nice group.
i wish i had planned better and had a better idea of how long it would take to do all of those things and the challenge of doing them while holding nell. anyway it all worked out.