Category Archives: birthdays

Other children

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Last night I stood at the top of the stairs and identified with nobody so much as Mrs Doyle on the windowsill, because it seemed for a moment that the best way to get down would probably be just to launch myself skywards and hope for the best. Which is to say that my thighs are only slightly less painful today and I’ve given myself a rest day from exercise.

(Skip to 0.11 if you don’t see how this is relevant. I couldn’t find a shorter clip.)

I’m quite pathetic. You’d think I’d run a marathon at the weekend instead of done the teensiest bit of exercise. And of course my lovely husband who had actually run a 10K race on Saturday was being very kind and not taking the piss out of my situation at all. But lunges really are evil.

I am out of inspiration for writing other places so I’ve come back here to blather more personally for a while. Thank you for being the people who let me blather. It’s nice to have my own blathering space.

—–

I find other people’s seven-into-eight-year-old boys quite terrifying. They’re bigger than mine, they’re more sophisticated than mine, they know about Minecraft and pop music and a lot more swear words than mine does, and they seem inclined to do all sorts of dangerous things. (I know you’re thinking mine knows the swear words and just isn’t telling me, but I’m pretty certain he doesn’t. We’ve talked about it.) In comparison, I tend to think that mine is really remarkably sensible and at least listens when I tell him something’s dangerous.

Maybe other people’s children are always unnerving when you’re used to your own. It’s nice, really, because it makes you appreciate what you’ve got when they go home. I can think, “Well, he won’t eat dinner, but at least he likes my cookies.” Or whatever.

It being now just about April, it’s time to think about his birthday party. He wants to go to laser tag, which he’s done just once before. I think rather than a whole (expensive) birthday party at the laser tag place, we’re going to let him take two friends to laser tag and then have a party separately at home, so he can invite whoever all his best friends are and I don’t have to worry about numbers and no-shows and RSVPs and transporting cakes and children and … and all I have to worry about is feeding and entertaining an unknown number of scary eight-year-old boys in my own home… how hard can it be?

Dash posing

Don’t answer that.

My Little Pony birthday party

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Excuse me while I go vaguely Pinteresty on you now for a few minutes. (But not very high-class Pinteresty. More underachiever Pinteresty.)

When I was thinking about Mabel’s upcoming fifth birthday party a few weeks ago, it struck me that My Little Pony would be an excellent theme, but when I searched for some help online there wasn’t much out there. So I figured I’d fill the gap in the market with a couple of half-assed suggestions. (That’s a pun. Ass/donkey/pony. See? You’re welcome.)

It was only very loosely MLP-themed, as parties go, but five-year-olds – or three or seven or whatever you’ve got – they don’t need every little thing to match. Even if most of them didn’t twig that there was a theme, as such, it doesn’t matter, really. The birthday girl knew what was going on, and everyone had fun. It just gave us something to pull things together with.

I bought a cheap MLP colouring book at Target and ripped pages out so that everyone could do some colouring as they arrived. It’s nice to have something non-interactive to help the children warm up to each other and their surroundings, especially if they don’t all know each other already (mine did, as it happened). Alternatively, you could probably print some colouring pages from the internet.

The main event (mane! hah!) was what we I liked to call Thunderbolts Academy, which, as any good MLP viewer knows, was where Rainbow Dash went to learn to be a super-fast flyer – a sort of Top Gun for ponies. I modeled this activity on the Jedi Training Course we’d done for Dash’s Star Wars parties : a simple obstacle course where the kids had a couple of things to jump over and walk along and crawl under in order to receive their prize: wings! Because now they’re pegasus ponies!

I ordered fairy wings in various colours (but mostly pink, to be honest) from HaloHeaven . At $2 each, they’re great value, and made a much nicer take-home gift than a goodie bag full of crap. (Because you all know how I feel about goodie bags .) I urge you to do this: there are few things cuter than a roomful of four- and five-year-olds unselfconsciously wearing wings.

One they’d got their wings, they played for a while before we had food and cake, and then we let them all outside to leap (like ponies) in a big pile of leaves that we’d raked up for just this purpose. (Obviously, good weather and an autumn birthday are vital to this step. We’ve been lucky in past years and usually manage to let everyone work off their sugar rush this way.) I didn’t take any photos of the leaping in the leaves because I was viewing from inside, with a beer, and the other parents, most of whom elected to stay even though we’d said they could go. I take this as a compliment, though whether it’s because they like the company, or the cake, or the beer, is not clear.

If you want some more structure, pin the tail on the pony would be an obvious game to play. Pony-shaped  piñata , maybe? Or maybe whacking a pony with a stick is contrary to the theme; a dragon might be better.

My food was not pony-themed, because I bake what I like to bake for parties, and attempting a horse-shaped cake is way beyond me. Nobody complained about the rectangular chocolate cake (that didn’t even have icing on the top), or the brown-butter Swiss meringue buttercream -frosted strawberry cupcakes , or my signature pigs in blankets – even if ponies don’t eat pigs and they might be more thematically suited to a Peppa Pig party.

That’s the lot. Send your little ponies home with their wings and a smile on their faces before the cake has quite worn off, close the door, and put the kettle on for a nice self-congratulatory cup of tea. You’re done for another year.
This entry was posted in birthdays , party and tagged five-year-old party , My Little Pony on by .

Another five

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Mabel turned five on Monday, and I’m only now thinking to mention it on my blog. You can blame second-child syndrome, but it’s mostly to do with all the other posts that have been brewing while we’ve been away. And the way she defies description, this child. I can’t pin her down with a few choice words, because she is always so much more, so contrary that she’ll be the opposite of whatever I say, so impossible.

My impossible girl. Impossibly loving, defiant, demanding, thoughtful, intransigent, accommodating, everything.

I have a soft spot for four and seven and twelve. I don’t know why, but those ages hold magic. So I’m sorry to see my four-year-old grow up and on and become a five-year-old – or I would be, if it didn’t mean that I get a five-year-old who is so much easier to deal with in so many ways than her one-year-ago incarnation.

Mabel is direct, I can tell you that. She knows her mind, and she tells you about it. She doesn’t understand dissemblers; she’s not one for subtlety. And yet – sometimes she’ll pull my sleeve and bring my ear to her mouth and tell me something she can’t keep in, but she knows she shouldn’t say out loud. She’s learning, and she’s sharp like a knife, this girl.

And she’s funny and smart and inventive and can craft a pun or a metaphor or a rhyme that impresses, and she’s going places.

I can’t wait to see where those places will be.

The party of the first part

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We, hereafter also known as “the host,” hereby acknowledge that we will take your child (“the guest”) for two hours (or three if you’re lucky) on a weekend afternoon. You may leave the premises and we will not call CPS and denounce you for abandonment (unless they are particularly badly behaved).

In return, you must provide, along with your child, a present, lovingly/hastily wrapped, decorated with a handmade rosette/curly ribbon/animal stamps/nothing, of a certain value that will be deemed appropriate by your parental peers but will never be mentioned and cannot be inquired about.

Your child may choose to (or you may choose that they) dress up in their “party best” for this occassion. We accept no responsibility for mud, grass, ice-cream, purple frosting, blood, snot, tears, pizza sauce, juice, or ketchup that may stain their clothes during the time they spend with us. Likewise, if you choose not to dress them up, or they choose to rebel against such dressing, we retain the right to assume that you didn’t feel we were worth making an effort for. Any such offence may, but will not always, be taken with no redress on your part. (Oops, that was a pun.)

We agree to keep your child fed and watered during the time that they attend our party. If your child is returned to you hopped up on sugar/red 40/soda bubbles, you will just have to put up with it. We hope you spent those two hours we gave you barricading your valuables and putting foam rubber on all the sharp surfaces in your house. Extra padding under the sofa springs is also advisable.

We will attempt to entertain your child in a manner that is not life-threatening or potentially mentally scarring. If these attempts backfire and your child decides to spend the duration of the party a) having a meltdown, b) playing alone with our child’s toys, or c) demanding to know when the cake will come, we reserve the right to deal with this as we deem appropriate. If things are really bad we’ll call you, but I’m sure you would rather this was our final option.

We have hopes that your child will behave somewhat reasonably, though these hopes are modified according to the age of the child in question and the number of children of that same age present. Please do not abandon us with your child if you think those hopes are completely out of the ballpark.

If your child demands to take home again the present they brought, or any other present, they will be denied. We hope this does not cause offense, because it’s non-negotiable.

The host may provide goodie-bags, but this is neither promised nor stipulated in the contract. Any children demanding a goodie bag will be unceremoniously kicked out, unless a parent is heard to be shushing them on the spot. We can provide no guarantees in re the contents of said goodie bag, except for the fact that they will probably include items of exactly choking-hazard size that your other children will immediately fight over, and some more Red 40 for good measure.

Please sign here. Have a lovely time.

Way too many things to think about

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It’s October tomorrow. That means I’ve a lot of planning to do. For instance:

Planning in further detail our trip to Ireland at the end of the month -

  • what I’ll wear
  • what I have to buy in order to wear these things 
  • how I’ll masquerade as a stylish person instead of a slobby soccer mom who wears the same pair of jeans and scuffed mary-janes every single day
  • if the kids need new shoes for all the walking in rain that will happen (answer: yes)

And boring stuff like

  • car seats to borrow
  • things for kids to do on the journey

Additionally,

  • touristy-type things we might do when we’re there, now that the children are a little older
  • people I need to contact to see if we can pin down when we might see them
  • how wet an Autumn they’ll be having for those specific two weeks

Also, not to forget,

  • working out our best marathon-viewing opportunities, because of course B is running the marathon . 

Then, as a subheading, we have not merely

  • Halloween in Dublin: do we have to bring costumes? what costumes? where will we do the trick-or-treating? does B want to do some sort of elaborate themed family thing? (Answer: over my dead body; only if he organizes the whole thing; therefore, no.) Dash is talking about some variation on last year (Luke Skywalker) that involves a green lightsaber (very specifically) and a brown cloak and I think it’s just a ploy to get a new lightsaber when it’s neither his birthday nor Christmas.

but also (sigh, sunrise sunset, etc),

  • Mabel’s fifth birthday, in Dublin: do we have a family party? In which case, where? Can I bake a cake in our Air B’n'B rental apartment? Do we bring presents to Dublin? (No. What sort of idiot do you take me for?) But then I need to buy or order presents before we go so they’re here when we get back.

And of course, planning a birthday party with her friends for the weekend after we get back, when we’ll be only just over the jet lag but I’ll still be expected to infuse us all with sugar some more and again and repeatedly, unless she wants a broccoli cake which sounds to me like a great idea but maybe not to her brother’s taste.

Which planning will not be a trivial matter even though I can just bung an evite out there (thank the deity for evites; I love ‘em) because we’ll have to figure out

(a) just girls?
(b) which girls?
(c) just girls and one boy?
(d) siblings?
(e) just the one sibling of the one boy so Dash has a friend?
(f) and the one who’s the twin of one of the girls?
(g) but then, what about the boy whose birthday party she’s attending next week?
(h) parents?

And then we have to hammer out the decision in such a way that she doesn’t decide the next day and every next day after that to change her mind in some new and unspecified direction. Which probably means just inviting feckin’ everyone.

And then, there’s always looking way ahead to Christmas and making a cake and planning to go to the Nutcracker for the first time and whatever other things we should do when we have Christmas here instead of in Ireland.

So you can see why planning what we’re having for dinner tonight has just fallen completely by the wayside. Maybe there’s something in the freezer.

Slow-flowing river
Think calming thoughts.

Points of things

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Sky, sea, land

Tomorrow is the first day of the last week of the summer holidays. Mabel doesn’t go back to school till after Labor Day, but Dash starts second grade on August 19th. The second-grade thing isn’t phasing me, but the fact that the summer is almost gone is a bit stunning. This year seems to be going faster than any one before. If this keeps up, by the time I’m in my eighties, I imagine days will fly by like seconds. No wonder my mother is confused.

I partly feel like I’m just getting back into the groove of our nice laid-back summer (after the disruptions of going away, two weeks of camp, and then BlogHer) but on the other hand I’m looking forward to a bit more peace and the opportunity to throw away some of all the crap that’s been piling up around here. Because apparently I can’t do that when the kids are in the house.

I went to Target on my own for an hour yesterday and realised why I like shopping: it gives me a chance to center myself and plan things, whether it’s figuring out what might help for organizing the house a little more (I bought an in-tray!) or deciding what I want to, um, invest in this autumn. (Found a dress I want as a shirt, decided to e-Bay a bag I never use and buy one I fell in love with in Marshall’s; also tried on boots, but that’s not relevant ahem as I was saying…)

I thought I’d missed my Dad’s birthday and blamed it on the fact that apparently now I only know it’s someone’s birthday when Facebook tells me about it, and my Dad (needless to say) is not on Facebook. But then I realised I just had no idea what the heck date it was in August, and I hadn’t missed it at all. So that’s good.

I might have a freelance editing job lined up for when the kids go back to school. You might not get so much blathering from over here if I find I’m actually working instead.

In the last week both kids have started swimming underwater, Mabel for the first time ever and Dash for the first time since a little last summer. My kids have never been those ones who don’t seem to notice whether they’re on top of the water or the water’s on top of them – they would always crane their necks to keep their faces out of the water, even with goggles on for extra protection. So to see them whooshing around underneath all of a sudden is pretty cool. I told Mabel I didn’t do that till I was twelve, and she was well chuffed.

Technically, I finished the 30-day shred yesterday. That is, it was the tenth day I’ve done the level-3 workout. However, I did take off about ten days in July when I was sick and then away, and almost another two weeks from BlogHer until yesterday, and I spent a few intervening days working back up to it by doing levels one and two a couple of times. I don’t feel any different, though it’s not as hard as it was at the start, so I must be at least a tiny bit fitter and stronger. Dash says I look taller, which has to be a good sign. The scales still say I’m a few pounds lighter even though at no point did I stop eating all the muffins I usually eat. I will try to keep going until I get totally bored or something else happens or they go back to school and I try running again.

Since we didn’t do anything today, here are some photos from last weekend, when we took in some history by going to Fort McHenry in Baltimore. A decisive battle of the War of 1812 took place in Baltimore Harbor, and as the poet Francis Scott Key watched to see which flag would be flying over the fort as dawn broke the following morning, he wrote what would become the lyrics of The Star Spangled Banner.

Stars and stripes over Fort McHenry
Teeny little flag up high; huge enormous flag down low
Three people walking the battlements
Walking the battlements

Things to do before I turn 40: a very short list

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Happily, I didn’t have any set-in-stone plans for things I had to do before my thirties – those halcyon days, how I have enjoyed them – ended. I wonder what I might accomplish in the time I have left…

  • Finish reading this book. [unlikely; I'm only halfway through]
  • Go to bed early [one more chance for that]
  • Buy ingredients for something to bring to tomorrow’s party [which is not mine, but I will be there, so I can appropriate it a little]
  • Make pizza for dinner
  • Buy a bottle of wine [ooh, ambitious]
  • Break up numerous sibling battles
  • Use emotional blackmail on the children to get them to bed on time for a change, just because it’s my birthday tomorrow [how likely is that to work, really?]

A whole new decade. It’ll be interesting.

Four point five cake

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Saturday was Mabel’s four-and-a-halfth birthday. I like to make a bit of a thing about half birthdays, because a year is a long time to wait, and also Cake, any excuse for; and because sometimes I can make it into enough of a milestone in their minds that they’ll do something, or start doing something, or stop doing something, just because now they’re whatever-and-a-half.

So Mabel is no longer having boo(b) in the evening. At all. This is great.
Also, she is going to start trying to wipe herself after a poo. All I’m asking is that she tries, that she’s willing to give it a go, which will be a lot better than the point-blank refusal I’ve had up to now. And she has been trying, since Saturday. So that’s great too.

On the other hand, she had a fit of the screaming collywobbles at drop-off this morning, and I very much hope that’s not indicative of how four point five is going to go. I know it’s a tough age and I’m prepared for some backsliding in behaviour and/or willingness to try new things, but I would really like to be able to bring her to school without the clawing and the screaming and the tearing at my heart, because it’s nice when that doesn’t happen.

Oh well. Onwards to five, which everyone agrees is The Golden Age, rivalled only by eight.

More importantly, cake.

I made half a batch of Burnt Butter Brown Sugar cupcakes (Nigella, How to be a Domestic Goddess ) topped with Dark Chocolate Icing (Darina Allen, Easy Entertaining ), and they were, if I say it myself, rather gorgeous. I haven’t done the brown butter thing before even though Smitten Kitchen and others have been raving about it for a while. It was really easy and I’m pretty sure that’s what I have to thank for the fact that these buns are still moist and soft two days later.

(I know, why on earth do we still have any two days later? That will be remedied, don’t worry.)

Seven

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… And seven years later, I have a seven-year-old.

I have plenty of memories of seven. I was in second class, with our cool just-graduated-from-college teacher who played the guitar and taught us the words to songs from Jesus Christ Superstar. That summer was a standout one because we went on holidays to Corfu (a Greek island), which was my first plane trip, my first experience of a different language and a foreign culture and heat in the air and warmth in the seawater.

I learned to swim there, and had my first taste of scampi. I was a fussy eater and when my parents found that I loved the scampi, they said hang the expense and I ate it every dinnertime. It was idyllic (except for the mosquitoes, which freaked me out in the middle of the night) and it’s seared on my memory.

I would love to give Dash an experience like that, one that sticks fast and never leaves him, so that he can still conjure the smells and tastes when he’s forty; but maybe you never know what’s going to be the thing that remains, or maybe we’ve given him too much already for him to have one of those standout summer trips.

Or maybe whatever you do when you’re seven stays with you for always, because you were seven.

Happy birthday, Dash.

Seven years

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Seven years ago, I was a technical writer at a university in south Texas, trying to help department heads hash out some sort of more detailed hurricane plan in the wake of Katrina the year before.
Seven years ago, I had a salary of my very own.
Seven years ago, I saw a lot of movies in the cinema.
Seven years ago, I’d never watched an episode of Curious George.

Seven years ago, my husband was at a conference a plane ride away, and I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant.

Seven years ago, I’d never heard of Facebook.
Seven years ago, I’d already been blogging indolently for a couple of years.

Seven years ago, I knew my life was about to change utterly, and I was about as ready for it as you can be.

Seven years ago – plus a few hours – my waters broke .