dinner guests

Thanks to our friends Claire and Scott for joining us for dinner. At the end of last school year (I am, in fact 36 years old and my life is still measured by semesters) I put together my new personal development plan. My biggest goal for this upcoming school year is to develop my gift of hospitality (which to be honest I never really knew I had but have become enlightened thanks to God, my husband and some friends.) So I'm trying to invite more people over but more importantly do it without getting stressed out or needing to have the perfect house and the perfect meal.

Claire is a friend from work and Scott is a friend from work as well but from out of town who will soon be moving to Ohio. I made, what I thought yesterday, seemed like a nice summer meal. I put chicken breasts in the crockpot this morning and made pulled bbq chicken sandwhiches, yummy Ohio corn and chips. (I also experimented w/ a new ice cream pie for dessert- which always leaves me wondering, why do I try something for the first time when having guests?)

The chicken turned out fine, as did the corn but then as we sat down to eat I started the internal dialogue... "chips... what was I thinking... chips? We never have chips, let alone for dinner. These friends are healthy friends, they don't eat chips... they are going to think we eat chips... blah blah blah." It truly was work for me to push those thoughts from my mind, declare that it really didn't matter WHAT we had on the table, the friendships around the table were more important; Olivia having other people in our home to talk to and play with, the 15 minutes that Scott held Turner- invaluable!

So, I'm in process, I'm growing and I'm not perfect! I'm working on it and someday I'll put food on the table and not think twice.

By the way, we also had these pretzel chips and I got this cheese dip they sold with them. The heating instructions on the packaging- faulty! So I made this gigantic mess in our microwave. No biggie, really. But the funny thing- the copy of my annual review (that was suppose to be turned in early May that I couldn't find and just recovered TODAY) was sitting out under the microwave-- covered in CHEESE-- because I was entertaining (it is upon this document that I declared I wanted to work on my gift of hospitality.) This will either work in my favor or detriment, depending on who reads these annual reviews.) Maybe I need to go back and make new goals about organization!