Please post your favorite Crockpot/slow cooker recipes. When the sun passes a certain latitude on its trip to Rio or thereabouts, my Crockpot begins singing to my stomach, attempting to seduce it with promises of juicy roasts made with French Onion soup packets. I am looking for new ideas to keep my family (and me) enthusiastic about Crockpot days.

Thanks.

We are hosting a house warming party in a few weekends. I hesitated calling it a house warming on the invitations because our house has already been warmed in the usual family manner: bannister sliding, introducing a grateful Mr. Toilet to Dr. Plunger, and tickle fights. It is belated, akin to celebrating a December birthday in March.

This is the first real party, aside from kids’ birthday celebrations, we’ve hosted. I think we are a bit nervous. We’ve put together an insanely huge list of foods and drinks we plan to serve. We may be going overboard, but we really want people to have fun and not go away muttering about Ruffles and canned onion dip. I keep picturing our party looking a little like an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Mary Richards was cursed to throw horribly boring parties. The idea of being known as the Mary Richards of the 21st Century doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t wear hats and if I did, I wouldn’t toss them into the air in exuberant displays of roaring womanhood. I’ve got other ways to do that. Worse than hat-tossing is bad-party-tossing.

Over the weekend we designed and printed postcard invitations. Hubby addressed them during the Broncos game. I swore I had a book of postcard stamps “around here somewhere” but I couldn’t find them. After I picked up the kids from school yesterday, I drove to the post office to get stamps and mail the invitations. The kids helped me make sure the stamps were as cockeyed on the postcards as our party plans.

There is sense of fate and destiny when you mail something from the post office because you know you aren’t getting it back.

I am excited for our first big party and overwhelmed by how much we need to get done. A house is warmed by the love of the family under its roof, but it is also warmed when we show hospitality—which is humbling. The memories made when friends and family laugh in our living room, eat salsa in our kitchen, and go on a kid-led grand tour of the basement and bathrooms will make these four walls even more precious.