A Gathering

My cherished friend Danette dreamed up the idea for the centerpieces. Beautiful and simple. Perfect!

We had the exact amount of seats we needed: 16. Our living room was at full capacity.

Beautiful and delicious catering provided by Prepared Catering

Did I mention beautiful and delicious?

By the end of the night the tables were moved to create space in the living room for some seriously fun Xbox gaming.

I feel it would be enigmatic of me to post all of these photos above without telling the story but I cannot seem to piece together the right words to coherently describe the evening. I'm not sure if it is exhaustion or the giddy joy of feeling success in an evening filled with laughter and good food. So I will try my best.

My husband, Ken, works for a very large international company. The melting pot of employees and cultures is really a beautiful thing. There are always people traveling both in and out of the United States. So when I found out a group of his coworkers from Singapore were staying in the US for several months for training  I figured it would be the perfect time to finally have some of his colleges over for dinner. Then I remembered I could not possibly cook for anything over a group of 6 people. That is just my personal limit to maintaining sanity.

Luck or fate had it that an old childhood friend of mine, Kelli, was a chef and had time to squeeze us in on a very short notice. It was also luck or fate that we had exactly enough room to seat all our guests with the borrowed and pieced together tables and chairs we set out across our living room.

The absolute highlight of the evening was when I decided to bravely bring out the Rock Band guitars and fire up the Xbox. Which soon led to pushing all the tables aside for some Dance Central. Oh yes....dancing! In the end it didn't matter much if my table cloths all matched (they didn't) or that I stressed over buying the perfectly paired wine (they all came through the door bearing gifts of wine, food and beer). It most certainly did not matter that I felt the need to move the Wii and a TV upstairs for the kids to have their own space. They didn't even venture up there once. Just being ourselves and opening up our home was enough.

I hope they all had an evening worth remembering, I know I surely did.