Party Time

This past weekend my son received the Sacrament of Confirmation.  Saturday was his actual Confirmation and Sunday we had a family party.  I have a large extended family and my son invited a ton of kids, so in the end we had 120 people coming to the party.  For the past two weeks the weather has been beautiful here.  So, at 3am Sunday morning when my husband and I woke up to the sound of heavy rain, it was not a good thing.  We started moving furniture out of the family room and emptied the downstairs finished basement figuring we were going to have to move the party inside.

By 10am the rain had started to slow down...enough that it started to look like we could have it outside.

We had two large tents, knowing that the weather report was not good.  The good Lord was very kind to me that day.  The rain stopped and it stayed dry until the end of the party.  Literally a half hour after the party ended the rain began again.

It was a baseball themed party.  As I've mentioned, my son and my husband are visiting all of the MLB stadiums between now and when my son goes to college.

On each of the tables, the centerpiece was a cube with a MLB team logo on one side, the logo on the team's hat on another side, the banner from that team and then a photo of my son in front of that stadium when he visited it.

I made each of the twelve centerpieces from scratch.  I started with a 7"x7"x6" box.

Then I tied five long ribbons onto a weight and taped it to the bottom of the inside of the box.

I then sealed the top of the box with the ribbons coming out.  This way the day of the party all I had to do was fill the balloons with helium and tie the balloons with the ribbon.

I then wrapped each box with wrapping paper.  I had to use a glue stick because when I used tape, you could see the tape, which just wasn't going to work.  The glue took a little more time, but worked great.

Each box had a different team on it (on the name cards it said which table the person would be sitting at...ie Yankees, Mets etc).

The name cards were baseball cards with a label made for each person.

Here are the centerpieces on the tables...each centerpiece had two blue balloons, two white balloons, and a mylar balloon to match the team on the box.

We added a fountain to the center of the pool (it's a great little gadget that you just hook up to where you would your pool vacuum).  You can see how wet everything was from the morning rain, but it mostly dried by party time.

Finally, we hired a pizza guy who turned out over 75 pizzas over the course of the day.  This was in addition to the regular caterer we had hired for the main food.

The pizza guy turned out to be a huge hit.  He just started this business of going to parties and making pizza in pizza ovens.  He also has a portable pizza oven if you don't own your own.  He made all of the dough himself and only bought the freshest ingredients.   He brought red and white checkered tablecloths and set out the pizzas there.  Cool concept plus the pizza was the best I have ever tasted.  I will definitely be hiring this person again...hopefully for a smaller scale party.

All in all it was a success.  The party ended at 5pm, but the last of the party guests left at 9:30pm.  Since we had been up since 3am...we were EXHAUSTED.  But it was all worth it...my son and his friends had a blast.

Don't forget my Swing into Spring party opens tonight at 8pm EST.  Hope to see you then.

-Judy