Carol’s Birthday Party at Irene’s

Each December, Irene’s sister, Carol, comes visiting from Chicago. We usually get the chance to celebrate her birthday in style, and for us, with luck: a dinner birthday party prepared by Irene. And we’ve celebrated enough birthdays with Carol now to know that there will always be a special present coming from Irene: Flowers.

They are not always actually flowers, either. I remember one year for Irene’s birthday, Carol took a photos of Irene’s friends, framed them in flowers and put them in one of those photo-holder thingies with the metal arms and the clips so the photos would resemble a bouquet.

This year, Irene arranged something pretty special: Balloon flowers, delivered by Mario the Magician, who then did a few card tricks for us, too!

When Maddy and Kevin are there, which is often, we celebrate their December birthdays, too. Happy birthday everyone!

More, after the jump!

Irene served an “Ugly Flowers” cocktail, called so for the theme of the evening, but based on a cocktail called The French Blonde from Saveur.com.

Irene also turned Mindy’s beautiful cauliflower-tahini salad into an hors d’oeuvre by making the dressing a dip!

Irene was donning an apron Carol brought for her; they know it was their mom’s, and it may have been their grandmom’s.

I’m not sure I remember what’s going on here:

Then Mario arrived with flowers in hand!

After the fun — and it was fun! — we sat down to dinner.

Onion soup with croutons and cheese:

And fried fish with mashed potatoes and a Brussels sprouts salad with blue cheese, pears and walnuts:

Delishy!

The gang:

The birthday kids blow out their candles:

We stayed a while, laughing lots. Really lots! Then we took Sam, who had been sound asleep in the pack n play upstairs, on the midnight run back home.