Didn't we just have a birthday party
last year?
<sigh>It has indeed been a year, and old obsessions have grown extinct and fossilized, giving way to new compulsions and fixations. This year the ticking off of our children's most recent solar orbit was celebrated on Saturday with a somewhat ill-matched, schizophrenic and odd mix of tributes to Ariel the Mercreature and the various autonomously mobile members of the
Cars cast. Though the theme was much more "evolved" than the subject matter from last time, all in all a kid's birthday party is a kid's birthday party. When you get down to it, the basics stayed the same, but the colors and crafts changed slightly.
There were kids -- and lots of them. I believe Stacy masochistically outdid herself by inviting something like 26 of L and N's pint-sized friends from church, school and the neighborhood.
The vast majority of them showed and we were awash in pre-K's. Add to that the average of 1.3 parents per kid, plus all the immediate family, extended family, honorary family and dishonorary family, and we were pretty much bursting the seams of our little 1300 sq. ft. house
Prep started several days beforehand with Stacy nailing down the copious list of kiddie-activities (the full gamut of which would have taken a week of parties to actually have played through) and establishing the menu fit to feed a small, though rather active military base. Craft supplies and a bazillion culinary ingredients were acquired and the prep work began in earnest Thursday and Friday. (Cooking, cleaning, decorating, game-making.) By the time Saturday rolled around we were almost ready - if wild-eyed panic and frantic racing through the house with our hair on fire qualifies as "almost."
The morning was chilly and overcast and it spit and misted a little, bullying us with all these threatening but in the end impotent rain clouds. It actually worked to our advantage as it kept the house and yard cool and kept our burgeoning wasp population tucked snugly in their little wasp beds for most of the morning. (We've been inundated with yellow jackets this summer and they seem to
love the sunshine.)
Stacy had wisely "hired" a couple of the older girls from church to help out with the grunt work - birthday party roadies and bouncers, if you will. They showed up for the pre-show sound check at 11:00 and got to see us reduced to our most animalistic fight-or-flight survival instincts. (Thank goodness for level-headed, focused, dependable near-teens to keep us from going over the edge.) At 11:30 the figurative clouds broke and it started raining nursery schoolers. The two or three hours that followed are a somewhat loud and sucrose-drenched haze.
A revisiting of photographic evidence reveals that first there was lunch - hotdogs for the kids (pretty cruel, I thought) and sandwiches and salads for the adults. There were also little cups of blue jello with candy fish floating belly-up within the goo - the top of the cups thrashed into a perfect-storm frenzy with the addition of some hastily applied Cool Whip
®.
Then the helper-girls were parachuted into the fray where they were tasked to paint as many little-princess finger- and toenails as they could. (N was expressly denied a manicure.) The boys were given little foam car kits to put together their own race cars and the girls were given little foam-rubber tiara kits.
Then there was a group painting session where everyone got to paint a couple of paper plates which, with the addition of a few staples and crepe paper streamers, were quickly transformed into breeze-fluttering jellyfish ready to wrap unsuspecting merpeople in their undulating tentacles. (I have to admit, I thought these were pretty cool looking.)
At some point the kids were herded over to the garage for a rousing game of
Pin the License Plate on McQueen and then back to the lawn for a variant of the hot potato game where a stuffed fish and toy car were passed from kid to kid until the music stopped. Having learned our lesson well with last year's disastrous "extinction game," this time, the kids caught holding the fish and racecar weren't ejected unceremoniously, but were ejected highly ceremoniously, "winning" candy and prizes for their skill at being eliminated so deftly.
The fete wound down with cake and the illicit singing of "Happy Birthday." This song, by the way, is under copyright protection by the Time-Warner Music Group, who charges insanely high royalties for the right to perform it publicly. Talk about party-poopers! It does not enter the free public domain until 2030. We chose to be scofflaws and sang it anyway.
The two cakes offered at the event were similarly borderline illicit. One featured a red-headed blend of woman and fish, perched on a rock - one that looked strikingly similar to Ariel the Mermaid from Disney's
The Little Mermaid, but was just different enough to the eagle-eyed to clearly free us from any trademark infringement liability. (About an hour before the party the merthing's frosting fishtail slid inelegantly down the rock and onto the table, essentially severing the poor creature in two at the waist and further distancing it from its litigious look-alike.) The second cake was a representation of a rusty tow truck that looked suspiciously similar (but not similar enough to be indicting) to the character "Mater" from the other Disney movie
Cars.
*
Random Pictures:
The silliest girls on the planet.
Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett? I can never tell em apart.
Some of L's gifts from Gramlynne
Yup, we had a lot of kids.
Little J from church hit it off with GGPa. He jumped up in his lap, chatting merrily. He even helped GGPa out greatly by eating most of his cake.
Even Buttercup from next door wanted in on the action.
Our son N seems to have a thing for L's school chum K. He told her several times during the party that he loved her. K wisely let the comments slide by.
The aftermath:
*Any resemblance to cakes living, dead or animated is purely coincidental. Cakes may contain dairy and nut products and may have been produced in a home on baking equipment also exposed to wheat products, fish sticks and probably the swine flu. Consumption may contribute to weight gain, respiratory and cardiac stress and general feelings of euphoria. Persons unable to let it go and relax should contact their physician before partaking.
For some inexplicable reason L has taken to calling Stacy "Mother" rather than her previous "Mommy" or "Mom" (or the two-syllable foghorn-like "Mooooo-oooom" when she's yelling for her from another room). I'm not sure where she picked up "Mother." It sounds pretty creepy and it gives Stacy the screaming heebie-jeebies. Especially at the pre-school in front of all the other pre-school Moms. 
N, however, is at least a decade ahead of his sister. I am occasionally referred to as "Daddy-O." I know I'm one cool cat and not at all like all those other square Pops out there, but I'm not exactly sure I'm groovy with the fact that my three year old has become a beatnik.
One of the toys N got for his birthday was a little wooden train set. No batteries, no lights, no whistles, no voices encouraging you to go see some Disney movie. It's an übersimple imagination-stimulating toy that might indeed have come out of the 40's or 50's. I love it, but what I love most is that N loves it. It really has grabbed a-hold of his individual play-quietly-by-himself mentality and will consume him for hours. A year or so ago I bought him a little floor mat with roads and buildings printed on it, designed for matchbox-type cars. It was a little much for him when I got it, but being of the same ilk as the train set, he now loves it. I will be in the kitchen working on the computer while L and Stacy are in the backyard or off in the back of the house and I'll listen to N talking quietly to his cars, sometimes very merrily, but sometimes with this serious concern in his voice like there's some sort of issue that all the little cars are going to have to come together to resolve. I love it. Now he's doing that with his train too.
