The Open House, or Why I Have Only Two Kids, Spaced Apart

So I have now faced down one of the greatest challenges any parent could face, and I do believe I have won: the graduation open house. The planning for such an event was second only to the planning for last year's wedding, but since we paid everyone to take care of last year's wedding, the open house was a lot more work.

I've actually been stressing about it for months now, but the actual work began about a month and a half ago, when Katie and I decided what kind of announcements to send out. She had opted not to get the traditional announcements that the graduation announcement companies charge lots of money for, and instead we discovered that we could have an announcement printed at one of my new favorite establishments, Costco, complete with a lovely photo of Katie (see above), for not lots of money. So step 1 was accomplished. It was relatively easy.

Katie had decided that she wanted to have a dessert open house, so we toyed with the idea of a chocolate fountain, but found that we were surrounded by naysayers (you know who you are), so we opted for less messy, less oil-demanding desserts. The whole problem for me with the open house thing is that you might invite 125 people, and maybe 67 will show up. But maybe 125 will show up. Or maybe if all your child's Facebook friends checked her status announcing her open house, 237 will show up. You'll either have far too much food, or far too little. You cannot win. At any rate, I'm not one of those people who just "goes with the flow" very well. If I had my way, I'd know how many people were coming; what time they planned to arrive; which desserts from the dessert menu they would be eating and how many of each; and whether they wanted punch, coffee, or water. So this was a real exercise in flexibility for me, a growth experience.

The dessert buffet included the following:

chocolate cake with strawberry filling (from Costco, of course)
white cake with white filling (again, Costco)
sugar cookies with blue icing (to stay with the blue and white school colors--baked by me)
banana bars (made by my mom)
heavenly dream bars (an extreme Rice Krispie treat, made by Katie and probably the most talked-about of the dessert items)
mini cheesecakes with blueberry topping (blue/white theme, baked by Katie and me)
almond bars (my personal favorite, baked by Henry's mom)
fruit and fruit dip (no one touched the dip, but it was excellent)
and probably the most popular thing--a citrus punch that made 90 cups; I thought we'd probably be drinking it until Jonathan's graduation, but it was drunk to the dregs by the end of the evening
and the obligatory coffee and water

If guests left without a sugar buzz, weighing what they weighed when they came in, it was their own fault.

We decorated with blue and white daisies and photos of Katie everywhere. She made a tri-fold board with a variety of pictures from infancy to present. There were balloons and confetti, which was a lot of fun to clean up come Saturday morning.

Of course, the event was not without its moments. The evening began at 6:00, so Katie and I left our house a little before 5:00 to make punch and put on the finishing touches (the open house was at our church's fellowship hall since I couldn't deal with the unpredictability of weather). We made our way down Kalamazoo Avenue, which, as usual, is under construction. The traffic was terrible. As we approached the intersection of Kalamazoo and 60th Street, I suddenly realized that we had no key to get in, and Henry would not be coming for another half hour or so. To turn around and go back home would be pointless; by the time we were actually able to turn around and re-enter the traffic headed the opposite direction, Henry probably would be on his way. So we pulled out the church bulletin that I keep in my purse (so many times that has been useful), and looked for the elders and deacons that lived nearby whose phone numbers we had with us. It's only right that our friend Harry, who we have known since before Katie was born, provided us with a key and saved our behinds, not for the first time in our friendship history, I might add.

It was a lovely evening, and our guests included family from Ohio, Indiana, and other parts of Michigan, friends from our former and present churches, co-workers of mine who have overheard me arguing with Katie on the phone for the last four years and thus share an important piece of her life, Katie's friends, and just friends we have known for a long time.

I'm thinking that we should have made it a two-day affair, because in spite of the fact that I left a lot of stuff behind for the youth group to eat on Sunday and several guests accepted my pleas to fill a plate and take it with them and I made a small dessert plate for a shut-in from church, we have far more dessert than any family of slightly overweight people should have. If you're in the neighborhood, and you have a hankering for some cake, stop on in.

And I now have three years to start planning for Jonathan's open house, and I suspect that he won't be nearly the help that Katie was . . .