Planning and executing a birthday party is always fun. A milestone birthday party is the most fun of all. Recently my best friend and I threw a 30th birthday party for a mutual friend and we held it at a condo in the Aldyn.

For those of you not familiar with The Aldyn, it is a great luxury condo complex in Manhattan. I, unfortunately do not live there, but another friend of mine does and he graciously allowed us to use his condo.

When planning the party we went easy on the décor. The views from. The Aldyn are pretty spectacular so we added some floating candles in vases around the place and some balloons.

The food we ordered from a site called Appetizers To Go. It is a high-end frozen appetizers company. Most of the food was great, but the biggest hits were the Latkes, the Beef Wellington and the Sliders.

We had a bartender and a basic bar which was mostly stocked with some great wine and beer. We did not have a fully stocked bar which made it work more smoothly. Experience has shown us that if you have a fully stocked bar it takes longer for people to decide what they want and also longer for the bartender to make the drinks.For entertainment we had some fun with the music. iTunes has a great application that lets you preset your music and allows anyone else with an iPhone, iPod or iPad to request music, vote on the next songs to be played and things like that. We left an iPad

out so people can make requests if they did not have a device of their own. People loved it!

Basically the entire party was the DJ.

As people left we gave them a box that had two cupcakes in it and a note that thanked them for coming and wishing them some sweet memories of the party. We bought the cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery.

By keeping things simple the party was a lot of fun and not hard to prepare for. The Aldyn was a great place to host the party and everything went over really well. You should check out the

Appetizers to Go website, they ship everywhere. For those fortunate enough to live in Manhattan you can never go wrong with Magnolia Bakery.

Plan your party like this and fun will be had by all.