Tips From the Trenches

I've lived to tell the tale, in case you were wondering.  We celebrated Moshe Yosef's bar mitzvah yesterday afternoon, and everything---somehow---went off without a hitch.  The boy did his thing in shul with a kind of finesse that his mother can only envy.  I raced home afterward to throw food on the table for 40 of the friends and family members who were able to join us, and actually had things pretty much in place (thanks to my faithful team of superheroes) before folks arrived.  Nothing burned, broke, or otherwise flopped, and as a bonus, I have enough leftover food to feed each of you and your extended families for the foreseeable future.

Don't try this at home.  But if, for some silly, silly reason, you choose to disregard my sage advice, MAKE LOTS OF LISTS.  Try not to lose them.  Do not make said lists at 3 in the morning.  Do not abbreviate.  You will have significant difficulty figuring out, by the dawn's early light, what you meant by "fls bma?" (And if you don't, could you please contact me by email?  Because I still have no clue what I was talking about.) 

Be specific.  Don't, for heaven's sake, write "salads" on your menu.  Because you'll certainly forget that you meant egg salad, coleslaw, cabbage salad, and green salad, and if you don't forget what you're serving you'll invariably forget what's in which fridge.  Or freezer.  Which brings me to my next important item:

LABEL.  You don't want to spend precious moments digging through the freezer on the morning of your event (while you're trying to hustle your wiggling,combative, half-dressed brood out the door) trying to figure out if this foil pan is full of apple kugel or veggie kugel, only to find out that it's actually a mixture of grated chalk and mouthwash that "might explode "if I expose it to the right combination of elements, Mommy."

If you're channeling Martha, change the channel.  Quick.  This will spare you the possibility of finding yourself at the dining room table, gluestick in hand, making dozens of tiny flags to adorn the brownie cupcakes.  Because people might not feel very festive if there aren't cupcake flags, you know?  And you owe them that feeling of festivity, right?  Yeah---not so much.  Ditto for the cupcake stand you felt compelled to fashion (at 2:30 in the morning) from hubby's discarded sheet of styrofoam and a spool of ribbon.  And the meringue lollies?  Not worth it, baby---not unless you have stock in Prozac (or at least an oven that's functioning properly...)

Know your limits.  (Then go ahead and blow them out of the water.  It's fun.)