This past weekend my husband and I had our six week old daughter baptised. As parents, baptising our children as infants comes from the promise we made in our marriage vows to raise our children in the faith. Baptism is a very special and important event in our child’s life and we wanted to celebrate it accordingly with our daughter’s godparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. This means that we were going to have a little party. This would be my first hosted party post-partum but I was definitely up for the challenge for this very special celebration.
Preparations for the baptism after party began the day before the special day, I employed the help of my fifteen year old sister (two pairs of hands are more efficient than one in this particular case). Our daughter’s baptism was occurring after the evening vigil mass so our party would begin around dinner time. The first task to be tackled was to make a robust and filling Shepherd’s Pie one with lamb and a much larger one made with beef (although Shepherd’s Pie is traditionally made with lamb, this particular meat does not always please every one’s palate). When making such a large volume of this tasty and savory pie, the prep work becomes a daunting and time consuming task. It took both my sister and I a good hour to prep everything and another hour to do the initial cooking. Once the meat filling was cooked it needed to cool a bit before adding the famous layer of potato mash. It then needed to cool a bit more before going into the fridge ready to be baked the next day. By the time this entire process was done it was quite late and we still needed to make and eat dinner. Our preparation would have to wait until the next day, the day of the baptism.
(To be continued …)