My mom turns 60 tomorrow. So to celebrate we decided to throw her a party. Unlike with Richard’s party, this one was thankfully not a surprise. It certainly made planning and coordinating things easier (heh).

My older sister has been the primary organizer, mainly because I’ve been preoccupied with stuff in my house, hosting Christmas, and throwing a surprise party for Richard, and my little sister is too far away (up in Seattle) to be very effective at coordinating a party. We made it as easy as possible, and decided to have a potluck open house. My little sister – the baker – flew back down (with brother-in-law and niece in tow) with two huge sheet cakes and decorated them once she arrived. I dutifully found a local party supply store and stocked up on plates and napkins and plastic silverware. My parents cleaned the house and stocked up on soda. And my older sister sent out all the invitations and coordinated any RSVP’s and put together an awesome photo board and a ‘How Well Do You Know Mom’ board with questions and answers, and generally handled all the rest.

The whole family descended on my parents’ house Saturday morning and between the eleven of us, we managed to get the whole house decorated and ready with plenty of time to eat lunch and then collapse weakly into chairs and rest for a few brief moments before the first guests started to arrived. After that, I’m not sure any of us got a moment to even sit down for the next three or four hours. The house was completely packed. I’m not entirely sure how many people showed up because I know not everyone signed the guest book. My sisters and our husbands and I somehow managed to keep on rearranging the table enough to fit all the food that arrived, and kept the ice bucket filled, and pointed people toward the bathrooms, and made sure everyone had a name tag. My dad had hired a balloon artist, which turned out to be an awesome idea, if only because he managed to keep the pile of kids who showed up entertained, and the amount of child wrangling the rest of us had to do to a minimum. And then as suddenly as they all arrived, the house cleared out and it was over, and we were left with a whole lot of balloons and a big pile of birthday cards for my mom, and a table full of food.

We ended the evening with dinner (although after picking an overloaded table of food all day none of us were very hungry and more birthday cake, and then we all crowded into one room and played games. For the first time, all the kids were all old enough that we could try something a little more family oriented, so we did a few rounds of Scattergories (the kids were paired up with adults) before it was time for them to all head off to bed. And then we adults switched to Balderdash, which we haven’t played together in years, but which, as it always does when we play, ended with most of us crying from laughing so hard.

My little sister and her family flew back up to Seattle this morning, so we had to hug everyone goodbye last night, before we drove back home. I think both Richard and I would have loved to have followed yesterday with a quiet, lazy day, but the house was starting to look a bit scary from the accumulation of dust bunnies, and we had a gaming session planned, so we went out for bagels and then swung by Target to buy things like a duster and a new waffle iron, and then we came home and spent a a few hours cleaning and scrubbing and generally whipping the house back into shape.

So now the weekend is over, and even though I feel as if I really would like a weekend to recover from my weekend (what with the party and the cleaning and the gaming this evening), it was a lot of fun, and tomorrow my mom turns officially 60 and I hope the party was a good way to usher it all in.