Party Planners

I don't know how event planners do it, but I can understand why they need a whole staff to pull it off.

My 7 siblings and I have been planning an 80th birthday for our mom for a few months now. We are 8 non-event planners trying to pull off one single event. Seems like it would be easy enough. Everyone picks a task to do and we come together and get it done. Maybe in 24 hours, when it's all said and done, we can say it happened just like that.

Now, though, it seems like the hundreds of emails were not only building up excitement to the big day, they were building up stress, too.

Today was almost the culmination.

We hit the road and headed Up North this afternoon. By late afternoon, we'd all converged on the Cushing Community Center -- the site of tomorrow's birthday bash -- and tried to see if every detail had been attended to and tried to agree on how each should be executed. You've heard the phrase "too many cooks in the kitchen"... well, it can be tough to all agree on how this is going to be set up when really, we just want to do it how Mom wants... and hope she'll be happy with it.

Thanks to some very talented siblings, I think she will! The place looks great and we have enough food to feed a small army. Which could show up!

It's out of our hands now, so all we could do was get to the hotel in Siren, check in, go eat a very late dinner with my sister Rayna and brother-in-law Paul -- up from Texas -- and try to relax for a few minutes poolside.

Sleep should come pretty easy. And, thank god, this should be the last night I have some disturbing dream about running out of cake...

Let's party!