It's Monday night, at the end of the holiday weekend. I'm on the couch in a heap, eyelids drooping and body aching. I'm also pretty sure I pulled a muscle in my neck. These are all symptoms of a post-entertaining slump, but boy was it worth it!

Sunday was P-Pay, or BS-Day (Baby Shower, duh), or in other words, the day that 20+ individuals arrived at our home to celebrate the impending arrival of our good friends' first born. Grandparents-to-be flew in from out of state, and a great assortment of close friends, family, and acquaintances gathered to party in style. 

Though a truly grand time was hopefully had by all, I'd be getting WAY ahead of myself if I didn't fill you in on all of the laborious chores we needed to knock off of our list before we could get to the fun stuff and make this infant-to-be's first official party a reality. Just to get the house in shape for guests, Alex and I had hours of work ahead of us. We had a list of flowers to plant, an ivy jungle to tame, neighbors' garbage to organize, a broken pond pump to repair, and much more. But let me back up and take you through the chaos leading up to the big day.

Though we had a number of party specific items to prepare, we first had to knock out our various home chore related items. Early in the week I made a little to do list for Alex, knowing he tends to work best under pressure and with the aid of a checklist. I tried to impress upon him the importance of finishing these items up early, as in, "not last minute," just for my own personal sanity. Though I left him with this bit of info, would you believe it if his list was largely unchanged when Saturday morning rolled around? Yeah, you might be able to guess, I was hardly pleased. However, come Saturday, he turned into a lean, mean, honey-do machine.

One of the biggest undertakings for the weekend was the taming of the ivy. After many years of moderately trimming back the ivy surrounding much of our yard's perimeter, we've slowly shaped it into something respectable. In recent seasons it's really taken off and somehow worked itself into a hulking presence in our yard.