Make no mistake – throwing a party at your home is a massive undertaking! The more people you have, the more chaos may ensue. But if you have some friends and family you can trust who are glutton enough to volunteer to help you during the event – accept the offer and thank them profusely!

Stefan and I have been planning this party for several months now. We went over nearly every detail, from the food and drinks to the music selection, and of course deliberated quite a bit over the list of people to invite as well. In the end we had a wide range of friends, family, neighbors and work colleagues attending and the mix was quite good.

When it came down to party time, Stefan’s parents were helping to make sure everyone had food and drinks and 4 additional friends were helping to give tours, watching sure no one wandered off where they shouldn’t and just helped out in general whenever needed. They were especially useful during the set-up and take down stages. Since we prepared all the food ourselves, there was quite a bit of work involved there…and of course decorating everything, setting up tables, drinks, glasses, plates, etc. It’s really quite involved.

On Saturday night, I knew we couldn’t go to bed until all the glasses, food, candles and everything else had been cleaned off the tables outside. Ayla had been tethered to the front door for most of the party which gave her a great advantage for licking everyone as they came in and out but when most of the guests were gone I wanted her to finally be able to run free. So at 2:30am when the party was down to about 10 guests it was time to start cleaning up. A few things had been cleared already and thankfully a lot of people brought their own plates into the kitchen to be disposed of – but there was still a lot left behind for Ayla to seek out. But I started and with 1 or 2 others joining in, everything progressed quite quickly and the courtyard was doggy safe in no time.

About an hour later, when everyone else was gone that wasn’t staying at our place, we had another small cleanup round to take care of all the leftover food (which thankfully wasn’t as much as we feared it might be but we bought way more food that we ever needed so we still have a ton of stuff around here – but thank goodness for that freezer trunk & our new fridge!)

The kitchen was by no means clean on Sunday morning and when we took the dog out for a walk, I sort of dreaded coming back to it. We’d only gotten about 3 hours of sleep and were still quite tired. But instead of a big mess, we walked in to a mostly clean kitchen because one of our house guests had started cleaning things up already, had emptied the dishwasher and was nearly ready to start the next one. A very pleasant surprise to say the least (thanks Steffi!!)

We took it pretty easy most of Sunday, catching up on some much needed sleep on the couch. Yesterday morning there was still a bit of clean up needed to be done, primarily involving collecting the bottles of wine all over the house (which people gave us – not empty bottles lol), bagging up the extra loaves of bread we’d bought and those which were given to us so they could go into the freezer and just wiping everything down finally after all the grime and crumbs had collected everywhere. I mentioned this before but it’s a German tradition to bring a loaf of bread and salt to a person’s new home, to ward off hunger & add a bit of spice to life although I’ve heard other reasonings behind this also. Thankfully one of our friends which Stefan works with organized a money collection and they gave us a card to Hornbach…and one loaf of bread with salt. That covered about 20 people who otherwise might have each given us bread! Instead we got about 5 loaves total – and are not thinking of ways to use it up.

I feel a bit like Bubba in Forrest Gump as we try to think up ways to use it all – “We can have croutons, bread crumbs, French toast, bread soup…I guess that’s about all I can think of.” 🙂 But if anyone has some good ways to use up French bread or dark breads, feel free to let us know. Otherwise we’re just going to slowly eat our way through it all 🙂

So now we know what we are capable of when it comes to parties…and we know that for Stefan’s 30th birthday next year we very likely be hiring some help to serve drinks and food.

But to all our helpers this time around – a HUGE THANK YOU again to you all!!!