When you are hosting a graduation party and expecting more than 80 people to come through your home, you have a lot of planning to do. Then try throwing the party on a Sunday when Friday night you have another graduation party to attend and Saturday you are out of town all day.
If someone had told me a month ago that this would be my situation, I would have gone bananas. It is not in me to function at this level.
I am Miss Organized, always having my ducks in a row. I prepare and plan well in advance for things. So this is something that should have really thrown me for a loop.
But strangely, it didn’t. In fact, my husband had been more stressed about all of this than I was…talk about a switch-a-roo!
One of the things that can get anyone in a tizzy is the state of your home. You may feel like your house isn’t ready for a large gathering. Actually, mine isn’t. But that is mostly because of the small space we have indoors.
So we made this an outdoor party. Thankfully we have a very large backyard that was able to accommodate everyone.
We only allowed two rooms inside the house to be used. The kitchen, which is very small, was closed off. All sodas and water were available in the garage in coolers.
I used the dining room, which has a sliding door that opens up to the backyard, for the food. All I had in that room was a table, no other furniture to allow for more space.
My children’s bedrooms were off limits. No friends were allowed to hang inside.
The second room that was open for guests was of course, the bathroom. That had already been deep cleaned with a toothbrush.
Knowing my entire house wasn’t going to be in use really helped. I also spent all week doing a lot of the setup and purchasing of food so that I could enjoy being out of town on Saturday and the graduation party on Sunday. In other words, I decided “I’m not stressing.”
Do you have any interesting stories of hosting a large party?
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Photo by soundfromwayou in Flickr