The Month of October, part I

I feel like I'm still trying to catch up after the month of October. I know you're thinking halloween and costumes and sewing, and you would be half right. The other (and first) half was a 40th anniversary party.

I will start with the anniversary party. My parents were married on October 19, 1968. That is something to be celebrated, not just with a greeting card with a gift card stuck inside. The other significant milestone-anniversaries haven't been acknowledge in any extraordinary way so we thought that this is one we needed to celebrate. We had some ideas months ago and what we might try to do but schedules and budgets took precedence. We decided that we just needed to keep it simple but nice. It is truly amazing to me how "simple" isn't necessarily "simple" in the execution.

The decision was to have a nice dinner with just my parents, my siblings and families, my Grandma, and aunt Cherie and her kids. That is 24 people. In order to make this a little nicer than the traditional birthday celebrations where it takes an hour just to get everyone dished up and half the people sit on the couch, bar stool, table, or take food outside, we needed to have everyone at a table and eating at the same time. Laura thought that we could do it at her ward building in the relief society room which is connected to the kitchen. She could see the schedule on her ward website and it was available...until 2 days before. Jon quickly made a phone call to find out who our building coordinator was and I called her. Within about an hour it was reserved at our building. Actually, the whole when part of this was a dilemma in itself; trying to figure out when my Dad had off from work and if they were going to go out of town and when. It was finally decided to do it on Thursday the 16th which was the first day of "fall break" a.k.a. UEA.

We also needed to decide what we were going to eat. After a few phone calls back and forth to Wendy and Laura we decided on potato soup, salad, and chicken salad sandwiches. This was decided before the location (or date) was finalized, so while I was at the party store I had to figure out which dishes, napkins, table covers, etc that we needed. I don't even know how long I was in there but I think it was about 10 hours trying to plan it all out right there, seeing as how the anniversary was only 2 weeks away from when we actually started doing.

The 40th is known as the Ruby anniversary so the decorations needed to follow that. Tablecloths, centerpieces, decorations, nostalgic items. I found a 40th anniversary banner, ended up buying a few balloons, we gathered a few photos of them to lay out (and Jason & Rebekah put a few in a collage frame as a gift), we found interesting facts from the year 1968 and posted them around the room, Laura put together a cd of 10 songs from '68, there were a couple flower bouquets, and, obviously, 3 tables and centerpieces.

Ahhh, the table covers and centerpieces. I spent a good amount of time just on the tablecloths. I didn't want plastic for a nice dinner but I didn't want to spend $75 just for tablecloths! In the end I found some pretty nice, "autumn red" damask, round tablecloths at Wal-Mart for about $10 each. They weren't big enough to be the only cover so I had to find something else to go under them and ended up finding out that our ward has vinyl ones with a crochet-look in the closet. (I had to go over to the church and see it in person to see if it would work because I just couldn't visualize it in my head!) So good enough for me! From the church we also used the nice plates and silverware. Have I mentioned before how grateful I am to be a member of the church?

For centerpieces Laura suggested glass bowls filled with potpourri. I liked that idea but in the end I decided to use the glass bowl idea but put some marbles in the bottom and float some red roses in them. I also found some floral picks to surround the glass bowl and place them all on top of white damask fabric napkins. As I was trying to figure this all out, I was taking pictures and then emailing them to Laura to ask her opinion because I was so frazzled by that point. I think it turned out pretty good.

We divided up the food prep and I was to make and bring the chicken salad sandwiches. This was yet another shopping trip and a good amount of time spent. I ended up getting started on it later than I wanted and it took a little longer to make than I thought so I got to the church later than I wanted. (big surprise, right?) Everyone actually ended up being late that day and I had to send Eric back to my house, I think 3 times, for things I forgot. (Can you blame me though? I had 4 kids to deal with and get ready and Jon had been working so much overtime and even more time on side jobs that he was almost non-existent in all my stress and planning.) So we finally got started... ooohhh about 8 pm. Oh, and before we could finally eat we had to take pictures first before we all spilled food and drink on ourselves. (Which was forbidden since we were on carpet in the relief society room!)

So it was nice. Not relaxing by any means but it felt a little more special. We just wanted our parents to know that we really do care about and love them and that it was worth all the stress to make one evening memorable and nice just for them.

Below is a short slideshow. I am actually quite disappointed with the amount of pictures, like not even getting pictures with my camera of Wendy's family. I think I was taking pictures with her camera for her. But I didn't get a picture of the photo table, the 1968 facts, the picture frame, the food tables, or anyone actually sitting down eating. Oh well, here you go...

Make a Smilebox slideshow