Homegrown Horror

Lately, at certain moments of the evening, when the heat of the day has exhausted even itself, I have felt as if I am living an ideal "Rockwellesque" life. Those savored minutes between cleaning up dinner and putting the kids to bed, I have been able to put my life on hold, sit on the deck, watch the giggling kids roll around on the thickening grass and sigh, 'This is it. I can't want any more than this"

And during one of these brief overly sentimental moments, Corey and I looked at each other and decided to have a dinner party. We are seldom simultaneously extroverted, and thus hosting a dinner party isn't that frequent of an occurrence. But all signs seemed to be pointing in the direction of a positive entertaining experience.

We now have a table and chairs for our lower patio, which is an optimal location for sniffing the freshly cut grass.

Our serpentine tenant shed his summer skin and moved on to bigger things

Our garden is producing more than we can handle. Tomatoes better than cotton candy. Even the bottle was unearthed in our backyard (but not the pickles)

multitudes of heavenly hummingbirds come with their chorus of flapping wings

Our garden is a jungle of delight

Adorable Twin baby moose have been lounging and nibbling outside our kitchen window (but if they get near my Japanese maple, I will wield the chain saw).

We really needed to share our little slice of paradise.

Who knew that Stephen King would be lurking around the corner to massacre our Norman Rockwell get-together? OK. It wasn't a murder fest or anything...but it sure wasn't fun.

While I was getting all the fresh food ready to serve, I started feeling a little weirdish akin to the weirdish that I felt those 900 or so days that I was pregnant and was outtaking approximately 75% of my daily food intake. I thought nothing of it, being used to entertaining while feeling under the weather.

A wave of nausea overtook me at the exact moment I was pulling the Bruschetta from the oven. Somehow this temporarily rendered me completely idiotic and I attempted to remove the blazing pan with my upper unprotected arm, rather than my ove-glove shielded hands. Also occurring at this precise moment, our friend's son came running in from the deck screaming with red welts all over his body. Apparently, a wasp family also thought our backyard was the perfect place to call home and made themselves swarm and cozy under our deck table. As soon as he sat himself down, eight stingers were quickly implanted in our little guest's belly

Forgetting about my blistering arm and unsettled stomach, I prepared a baking soda ointment to apply to the attack sites. As I was dabbing his skin with the concoction, I knew that this next wave of nausea was one of no return.

I left him and vanished into the bathroom for some serious gut wrenching outtaking.

That was the last my guests saw of me. I tried to venture out between episodes, but never quite made it past the door of my bedroom. It took Corey a while to figure out what had happened to me. I gave up trying to move and spent a few hours with my cheek on the cold granite floor...within an arms length of the toilet.

So if you are in the mood for a good dinner party......

you know where not to come