As promised......

...here's the details of the party.
My youngest son left last night and I'm alone again. And a little more settled down from it all.
The party was pretty. It fit my vision pretty well, full of apples and roses. I put some pretty picture frames on the tables with pictures of my mother at different times in her life. As you can see, it was really RED. Most of the guest wore red (the invitation asked them to if they wanted.) That helped too.








We did surprise her. She sort of walked around in shock the rest of the afternoon and she kept saying "I can't believe everybody knew about this except me."
Right after this moment, her husband handed her those dozen roses, I handed her my dozen and our little Robbin handed her four roses. And then her grandsons came in and handed her a dozen roses each, so she ended up with over four dozen roses. Red of course. I'm hoping someone got pictures of this moment. I didn't.
After we let her mingle a little and people ate, I read my list of "70 things you may or may not know about my mother." That was a lot of fun and went over well. And then we had someone bring the cake in. We sung happy birthday and she attempted to blow out the 70 candles, (took two tries) and then she opened her presents.
It couldn't have worked out better, I was proud and it was nice to see family members we'd not seen in a while and get to visit.


This is my mother in the center with her sisters. My Aunt Ellen on the left and my Aunt Betty on the right. Notice how close my mother came to wearing Red herself.