WEDIN Day 15: Party Time

Today was my dad's birthday party, so I definitely had no time at all to prepare anything. Just to give an idea the first people arrived at 1:30pm and the last left at 11.

All of yesterday my mom and I worked on preparing the dishes that could be pre-made and cleaning the house. My dad and my brother worked on cleaning up our garage and taking down our old, and broken, trampoline. We prepared a 4 bean salad, which took a while because my mom prefers to buy raw beans instead of canned; defrosted the shrimp for the ceviche, a Mexican dish with shrimp, tomato, avocado, onion, and lemon/lime; and made the pasta salad. I preferred cooking a lot over the cleaning part. At 4pm we left to another birthday celebration so it was a pretty successful day.

I woke up at 8:30 this morning without any real reason. As soon as I got up, I started helping with what had to be made today. I chopped a lot of tomatoes for the ceviche and finished preparing it. I also started making the beef empanadas that we were also going to be serving. (Just as a side note, if this seems like a lot of food - it is. My mom always makes way too much and we always have endless left overs.) Once my mom took over the empanadas, I started preparing the appetizers. We put out 4 cheeses, 3 kinds of salami/ham, hummus, eggplant (it was like pickled, but not actually pickled. Don't know what it's called in English, but a similar way of adding flavor), olives, and 2 kinds of chips. In Argentine culture the appetizers of a party, called picada, is always huge and everyone gets full just by that. But we still eat the main course, because who cares about being healthy at these things. Oh, I also made these spinach triangles from Costco that are absolutely amazing.

At around half way through the party (4pm) I showed the Prezi that I made for my dad that included pictures from him as a baby onto the present (all 50 years of his life). Everyone enjoyed it and it brought a lot of laughs and awww's, especially for the baby pictures.

Everyone stayed super late because no party can end before 9pm - school night or not. I ate too much food, like always. I still feel full enough to explode. I sadly burned my tongue three times - twice with empanadas, and once with coffee. I also got to try some of the strawberry margaritas that were being made. It was pretty good, but I only got like 3 sips. I hope I'm not too tired tomorrow and that I have a successful Monday. I'm crossing my fingers.