Eclipse

All I can say about dinner tonight is that it paled in comparison to lunch.

Lunch today was part of a farewell party at Koji's school sponsored by the "Mother's Association" in honor of several of the ladies who will be leaving the school soon. I was marginally in charge of the gathering, and I say marginally because I was willing to take charge of organizing the schedule and the take out order as well as the dessert buffet. I wasn't up for figuring out "game time," which is a good thing because the fruit basket game that someone else thought of and implemented was a thousand times better than whatever I would have come up with.

Oh, and did I mention that in the midst of this party/luncheon, we all had to go back over to the school classroom so that we could help with the kids' "graduation festival" that happened to be scheduled for the same morning? Yeah, I'm not always a brilliant scheduler. Koji and his friend Takeru were in charge of the "karate gokko" station, a place where every kid who paid a ticket had a chance to punch or chop at the wrinkled up newspaper that Koji and/or Takeru held up in front of them. Takeru was especially good at tearing the newspaper at just the right moment so that even the little girls felt like they were skilled in karate. Koji was more preoccupied with choosing just the right prize for each person, because everyone got a prize. Many of the prizes were home made, and now that I'm talking about them here I wish I had photographic evidence, because they were super cute, funny and enthusiastically received. For example, the recycled spaghetti box with several long pieces of yarn heavily taped to one end...was it some sort of rocket? We'll never know, but the kid chosen to receive it was ecstatic!

Back to lunch, which I ordered from the Cafe Lucci to Go menu. I went with:

*fried calamari
*salad
*rigatoni with vodka sauce
*bowties with meat sauce
*fettucine alfredo
*chicken parmigiano
*chicken asparagi

Note to self for future lunch orders: cream sauce seems to go over better than tomato-y sauces...no one's that excited about salad when there are carbs to be had...when there's a lot of dessert planned, scale back lunch items and then scale them back again.

Lunch was followed by a dessert buffet, to which I contributed a cranberry upside down cake. I was pretty excited about it, but I guess everyone else wasn't because only half of it was eaten. Oh well. It didn't help that it kind of fell apart when I turned it upside down, and that no one knew what it was. Again, a note for next time: put up some signs so people know what is being offered! I actually had that in mind to do but never got to it.

Later that afternoon when the kids and I got home and actually elected to skip karate because that's how tired we were, I had to just lay on the sofa for quite some time! Even when I got up to serve the kids some leftover mac and cheese, there was no room in my stomach for dinner. I think at some point later I ate some rice and beans or something, but I can't remember now. The point today was, lunch was a FEAST!