Expecting an announcement

Whenever DD and I host a soiree, someone invariably thinks it’s going to be a surprise engagement party.

There was lots of speculative murmuring at our joint 50th last year.

On Saturday night, DD hosted a Christmas in July celebration. When he ding-ding-dinged his glass to silence the crowd, I got a nudge-nudge-wink-wink from someone.

I dashed their hopelessly romantic hopes with a firm “nah”, followed by “besides, I’m still married, remember?”

DD was merely ding-ding-dinging to thank everyone for attending and let them know dinner was served.

While DD only hosted a smallish gaggle of friends on Saturday, it was a big-ish production to make it all happen.

We started on the Friday by grocery shopping, putting indoor and outdoor Christmas trees up, stringing lights, moving furniture around …

Saturday was a mad dash to borrow my sister’s giant inflatable Santa, grab extra supermarket supplies, trim the trees, string more lights, arrange little bowls of nuts on tables, get firewood for the fire pit, make sausage rolls and 50 million other things.

The box of Christmas-labelled wine I accidentally gave DD for his birthday last year also came in very handy.

I thought I’d come up with a genius catering idea by telling DD to ask everyone to bring a plate of their favourite Christmas food … how easy is that? And the spread they provided was delicious – everything from platters of fresh prawns to slow-roasted lamb to pavlova and trifle. But there was still a ton of effort involved in pulling the event together.

DD also reckons we got the timing wrong – kicking off at 3pm, with the last guests leaving about 10pm, meant seven hours of intensive entertaining.

I was deliriously tired when I crawled into bed. I think I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for being the hostess with the mostest and I’d forgotten how much energy is involved in working a room.

(It’s even more exhausting to recap the night in your head afterwards and fret about all the people you didn’t properly chat with, which led to a fairly patchy night’s sleep … well, between that and DD’s Woodford Reserve snoring … although when he suddenly stopped snoring I panicked he was dead … ah, the joys of middle-aged dating …).

Despite some of DD’s lovely friends doing heaps of washing up on the night, bless them, there was still a shite load of cleaning the next morning, plus taking down the Christmas trees and lights again.

We both felt a bit like zombies for most of the day, although DD is already talking about making it an annual event.

To brush the cobwebs away, we went for a quick swim at Warriewood Beach in our wetsuits on Sunday afternoon – the waves were a bit wild for a long one – then we sat eating fish and chips on his front lawn in our cossies in the sun afterwards.

I still think it’s bloody amazing you can laze around in your cossie in Australia in July. The beach was also quite busy with bikini and budgie-smuggler-clad peeps, sunning themselves on the sand.

I’m thinking maybe it’s time to eschew the fish and chips though. My mouth fell open when I saw one party guest on Saturday night who’d lost 15 kilos in three months on that 5-2 diet thingy. She looked amazing!

Since I appear to have nailed the 4-3 alcohol thingy, it’s probably time to expand my partial-abstinence to food as well as drinks. I’m thinking wheat and sugar should be the first to go. I’m not sure I’m capable of only consuming 500 calories on two days a week.

So I stocked up last night on lots of little tubs of brown rice mixed with quinoa and salmon fillets and other healthy stuff.

Let’s see how long I last.

Especially with pizza in the fridge … I got a few other meaningful looks from people at the party I told them I’d left my 15-year-old and their friends to mind my place for the night. They thought I was cuckoo! But, aside from coming home to a kitchen full of pizza boxes and cake batter smear, about the craziest thing the kids seemed to have done was watch Pitch Perfect on DVD.

Phew.

Hope you had a great weekend and caught some of that glorious sun.

Song of the day: Dixie Cups “Going to the chapel” (get a load of those frocks!)