For the past few years, a few of the ladies from church have gotten together for a Valentine’s brunch at someone’s house. This year, I asked if I could host, and I had a ton of fun making decorations for it. I sewed/quilted table runners, drew on plates, made a heart wreath, and started a heart topiary. I decided that since I had gone a bit overboard, I might as well get the most bang for my buck, and have a second Valentine’s brunch with just my neighbor ladies. They are such wonderful, kind women and I wanted them to know how much I appreciated having them as neighbors.
Since the church ladies were coming on actual Valentine’s Day, I invited the neighbor ladies for the Friday before. Noah and Alexandra were sick, but since none of the others had children it wasn’t really a problem. We just put them on the couch, popped in a video, and enjoyed our breakfast together. I was a little nervous, since these are proper Swiss ladies and I didn’t want to commit some horrible social faux pas. They had even RSVP’ed even though I hadn’t said anything about it on the invitations. And not just with a phone call, either. No, no, one lady brought over potted flowers and told me she would love to come. Two others wrote me little notes, and the others made sure to tell me personally if they were able to attend or not. That was really nice.
I wanted to make something fancy, but still be able to enjoy the actual breakfast with my guests. I was hemming and hawing back and forth on what all to make right up until the night before. I finally decided to do raspberry soup, homemade Zopf, and then a selection of meats, cheeses and jams. Simple, and delicious. Of course, I forgot to strain the raspberry soup, so a few lucky winners got whole cloves in their mouths. Oops! And I told them all that I didn’t serve coffee, but I did have three different kinds of tea, several juices and milk to drink. They were fine with that. Most of them knew I was LDS anyway, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.
Of course, Noah threw up on the couch just as we were sitting down to eat. So I had to jump up, take the covers off the cushions, clean him up and hand him a throw up pot before we could continue. sigh. We ended up having a really lovely time, but I was so busy chatting I didn’t take any photos. 🙁 They stayed til about 11, and then went home. It was really fun, and I definitely want to make it a tradition. Great neighbors like these are hard to find, and I want to nurture our good relationships as much as possible.