Miss Maria Hold-the-Eggs did not, as her pseudonym suggests, actually “hold the egg”, and went and got herself all kinds of up the duff. As in preggers, mit kinder, knocked up, in a family way, riding the baby train, all blowed up on baby... in any event, she failed the rabbit test, all right, in a big, bad kind of way.

Which is great for a lot of reasons, the least important of which being that it gives me a fabulous excuse to stop with the dour posts about OCD, antidepressants & other mental mishaps not otherwise specified/diagnosed. So it’s a win-win for you, dear reader, too; A soft pink palate cleanser to wash away the existential soup pain.

Because Miss Maria Hold-the-Eggs is one of my all-time favorite people on this planet, her pregnancy gave me a great excuse to co-host a Sunday party-- like I’ve ever needed an excuse to do that-- and with a tremendous amount of help from her lovely sisters, we threw the parents-to-be one really fun fete. No games, no crustless cucumber sandwiches and no estrogen-only requirements for admission, oh no. It was rock and roll, a burger bar, a boatload of beer and champagne punch and boys and girls from all sorts of creative provenance. In short, it was a really fun party to welcome our newest future ‘poloozian to her fold...and we all seriously cannot wait to meet her.

I’ve been asked before how it is that I throw parties for large amounts of people without killing myself (and, more often, the cat), and I think this party made for a really great template anyone can follow to have an easy time of it. Here is a list of some of the things I have on hand and some of what I have learned from a year and a half of steady on-the-job training...