PREP WORK

Saturday morning we rose early and began preparing for M**'s Graduation Party. It was just family, with each family bringing a side dish to share. Before Saturday, I had already bought a few decorations to make the event a little "festive"and had prepared all the food. (I had made Southwest Dip and Bacon-Onion Dip for the chips, pickeled beets and eggs, made my favorite cauliflower salad --yummmm--and pineapple and cream cheese lime jello salad, and cooked up the sloppy joes. My dear son had neatly cut all the grass and had done the trimming.

Everything was going along smoothly. I had left only one errand that had to be done that morning; I had to make a trip to town to pick up a few helium balloons for the table decorations. I had waited because I wanted the balloons to be fresh; nothing worse than deflated helium balloons. When I got back we set them on the tables, and things were starting to look nice. Then unexpectedly we hear a shot. My first thought was, "Whose shooting so close to the house". Almost simultaneous with that thought was my cry, "Oh no! get the balloons out of the sun"! Before we could rescue them, we heard another loud pop, and a second balloon bit the dust!








The remaining balloons found a new home on the food table. Orangeblossom was a great help. She loves to decorate.


I spent a good part of last week preparing a slide show of picture I had taken of our "little girl" over the years. (There were over 300 pics, many of them taken with other family members). We set up the laptop and kept the slide show going during the party. I was really surprised at what a "hit" this was; it set everyone to reminiscing and laughing.

I love DQ ice cream cakes -- but they're kinda pricey (okay, okay, they're a LOT pricey and they just weren't in the budget!) So I decided to make my own, complete with crumbly chocolate filling. I know they aren't decorated very well, but it got the point across. It's been years since I've decorated cakes. I decided to go with decorating icing in a tube for sake of ease. Big mistake! The consistency is all wrong, making decorating difficult. I may hate the greasy icing mess, but next time I'll make my own icing. It just works much better. Everyone thought that they tasted great!