My Little Pony birthday party

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.

The party of the first part

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.

Yoda cake, or overachieving for dummies

At some point yesterday I had an existential crisis. "I don't even know who I am any more," I found myself thinking. "Where has the old me gone?"

The old me, who swore she only made round birthday cakes with icing in the middle and on top, and possibly a shake of sprinkles. The me who didn't do fancy themed parties. The me who scorned such things.

And yet, here I was carving out Yoda ears from a layer of sponge cake and writing names on Jedi training certificates and carefully placing sprinkles with a tweezers. I hang my head. Not only that, I was doing it all for the second year running. So I can't call last year a fluke any more. Apparently this is the person I have become. I'm sorry, everyone.

---------------

Dash will turn seven on Wednesday, and we had his party yesterday, because when you have a midweek birthday you get to choose which weekend you want, and any child worth his salt will obviously choose the prior one. He asked for another Star Wars party, just like last year, and in a fit of enthusiasm, I suppose because that meant I had everything else all figured out already, I said, "I can make a Yoda cake."

Right then. One Yoda cake. It turned out to be much less stressful than last year's light saber cake, mostly because I didn't bother looking for the organic food colouring and because pale green is much easier to pull off in buttercream than bright red. And just in case you want to make a home-baked, non-professional- style Yoda cake for your own six- or seven- or thirty-seven-year-old, this is what I did.

First I baked a regular birthday sponge in two 9-inch pans. The amount in my recipe would have been better in 8-inch ones, really, but 9-inch is what I have. I knew the kids would be more interested in the look than the taste, and with nine children at the table, there was plenty here. (I did this part the day before.)

Not quite enough batter

I used Nigella's birthday buttermilk sponge recipe (not online, but from How to be a Domestic Goddess), as I did last year, but you can use any one you like, or a box mix, or make it chocolate if you prefer.

 

Then I looked at some cartoon-y Yoda images online (like this one) and cut myself two circles of paper the size of my pans, to figure out how long I could make the ears out of one circle. (The first circle was going to be the head, obvs.) I used the paper ears as a template to cut the sponge, once it had cooled completely. I made a couple of moons/asteroids/distant DeathStars out of some of the rest.

Making ears

Then I realised I had no plate the right shape for this creation, and just like last year, I Blue-Peter-ed a used cereal box and some tinfoil into a nice long shiny platter. Here are the head and the ears in place.

Naked cake

I mixed up some buttercream icing - not quite enough, because of course I had stocked up on butter but forgotten to make sure we had plenty of confectioners' (icing) sugar - and used a tiny spoon to make sure I didn't drip too much food colouring in at one time. I think two drops was enough, and I still have a green fingernail this morning.

Then I plastered the buttercream all over the head and ears, covering up the joins and evening out the slight height differences.

Green cake

(I ran to the supermarket for more sugar and made up another little batch for the moons. It turned out I had no other working food colouring so I just kept them white.)

At this point I was quite pleased, but of course I still had the "artistic" part to go.

I used the tip of a butter knife to draw eyes, the indentations in Yoda's ears and the lines around his mouth and on his forehead. Then I dipped the knife tip in hot water and found that made a much cleaner line, so I went over the eyes and wrinkles again that way.

 

I used green sugar (find it in the cake decorating section of the baking aisle, with the sprinkles) for the ears and put chocolate sprinkles carefully - yes, with my tweezers - in the lines to make the eyes and mouth. (Laugh if you will, but I had an empty house and was blasting Pandora on the Duran Duran station. I know how to live it up.) I used a little bit of the uncoloured buttercream for the whites of his eyes and a chocolate chip for each pupil.

And I decided to leave it at that before I messed it up completely.

Mabel is eyeing up the moon she wants to eat

I put the candles in the moons, so they were good for something after all.

The bad wife

I'm a terrible, awful, no-good wife.

It's my husband's birthday. Not just any birthday, but one of those ones with a zero on the end. I have no present to give him, no card, and there's no bread in the house for him to make toast with. (He likes toast.) "Here, I made you two beautiful children!" isn't going to quite cut it.

In my defence, we did have a big party yesterday. There were bellinis and beer and juice boxes and Indonesian ginger chicken wings and tabouli and quesadillas and salsa and pigs-in-blankets and two sorts of cake. There were kids running riot and grownups talking about physics and of course Mabel fell off the back of the sofa straight onto her head, but she was giggling a few minutes later and there's no bump to be seen this morning.

Tomorrow morning, I thought as I fell asleep last night, I'll go to the shops and find something, some sort of token present at least, something that I can give him on the day itself, something to provide a tiny indication of how wonderful he is and how happy I am to be here, to be us, to have done what we did and arrived at this point, which I hope is only the midpoint of everything, if that. Surely I can find some sort of something.

And then we woke up to four inches of snow this morning, and the schools are on a two-hour delay, which means that Dash starts at eleven but Mabel at ten, so you bring one child to school and then you bring the other child to school and by then it's pretty much time to turn around and pick up the first child and your morning is done. And there were wet socks and wet jeans and missing gloves and wet inside-of-snowboots and all the things that happen when they've spent an hour sledding before school to deal with, and now I'm here typing like the wind instead of out buying the perfect meaningful and symbolic token of appreciation.

Here, I got you a blog post. And a snowy vista. Love you.

March 25, 2013

Incidentally, is it bad parenting if I find myself saying, "Okay, if you must eat the snow, just don't eat snow that's grey or brown or yellow. Make sure it's nice and white."? I think that's just accepting the inevitable and working with it.

A very parenthetical list

So I thought if I put my to-do list here maybe it would shame me into getting something done. Something other than drinking cups of coffee and convincing myself that pie is a perfectly valid mid-morning snack. (It was apple pie. That's fruit.)

(We have an apple pie because I went to a bloggers' meetup last night and I felt so guilty about leaving B to get Mabel to sleep while simultaneously getting Dash to shut up and stay in his room and go to sleep that I made him a pie. Also because I'd intended to make it on Sunday but then I went shopping instead and bought lots of tops for me on clearance, and didn't even look at children's clothes, which is a thing of which I am very proud.)

(I have to give a shoutout to all the lovely DCMoms bloggers I met last night at the Mellow Mushroom in Adams Morgan where Jennifer and I went to break out of our comfort zones and meet new people and put not so much faces to names as heads on bodies. When you know people as a series of square headshots, it's always surprising to find that they're not all on the same level in real life - they're tall and short and narrow and wide and simultaneously older looking and younger looking and more gorgeous and more approachable and more real in real life than you could possibly imagine from photos. I met Sandie and Allison and Rebecca and Jessica and Jean and Aimee and Elaine and Michelle and Robin and other people too, who I am not managing to remember just now, sorry.  And we ate delicious pizza and the people at the restaurant were really nice to us because they're lovely people and you should check it out if you're downtown.)

So without further ado here is my to-do list:

• Make D's dentist appointment
• Fill in application to vote
• Make appointment at post office for passport application
• Make shopping list for the weekend's baking extravaganza*
• Clean house (but not too soon) (only downstairs)
• Get B a birthday present of some sort
• Bake something and freeze it to get a jump on the aforementioned baking extravaganza? 
• Make pumpkin bread or black-bean brownies for school-lunch desserts
• Bake bread for my insatiable carb-loving family
• Sort out that big pile of papers over there

*I have to explain about the baking extravaganza, and for that matter, why I only need to clean downstairs. It's not that upstairs stays magically sparkly all by itself, but more that nobody will be seeing it so it doesn't matter right now. We somehow have managed to schedule all our social events for the spring into this weekend - on Friday there's a block party potluck thingy, for which I have to make something (it'll be my old faithful kale and quinoa salad, because it's yummy, vegetarian (even vegan), and can be eaten at any temperature). Then on Saturday there's a house-party fundraiser for the nursery school, to which I said I'd bring a dessert - as yet undecided; what goes with delicious white sangria made by a real Spaniard? Something fruity . . . jello shots, maybe? And then on Sunday we're having a party here, hence the house-cleaning part.

Not a kids' party either. An honest-to-goodness real grown-up party, although it will essentially end up being like all the kids' parties with grownups that we've thrown in the past. But my my adored and much-put-upon husband is turning a significant multiple of ten (hint: more than 30, less than 50) on the 25th, and since I have no idea what to give him, I'm baking him a Guinness cake and making other things he likes and inviting over some of his friends and their children and hoping everyone will have a pretty nice time.

So I have to get plenty of sleep and not have any hangovers and be on top of my game for all that. Yup, that'll happen. Tell you what, you bribe Mabel to stay asleep all night, and I'll bake a cake for you as well.

Fork 'andles*

I have decided that all birthdays of my older child are like my birthdays before I was 25, while all the birthdays of my younger child are like mine after I turned 28. (I was ambivalent about 26 and 27, apparently.) I mean, with the first child you're always looking ahead, excited for the next thing; but for the last it's more backward looking, with nostalgia, not quite sure you want to be here just yet.

So Mabel's four now, and I don't have a three-year-old any more.

Four started out to be all I'd hoped for and more (once you get past the early waking which, astoundingly, did not change this morning despite the fact that we were all supposed to "fall back") - she wiped her own bottom, she put on her own clothes, she even walked quite a few tens of yards before remembering that she often demands to be carried. We were full of the joys of things four-year-olds can do, and it was lovely.

Happy morning birthday girl

Sadly, it seems that four-year-olds can't nap, so things went downhill in the afternoon, when it turned out that four-year-olds are often just as demanding of having their noses wiped and equally prone to screeching fits of disapproval as their previous-day's selves. Ah well.

Last candle

Apparently she didn't get enough presents, and I made the wrong sort of chocolate cake, and she wanted lemon scones instead of strawberry ones. But she did say thank-you to me very nicely, and unprompted, on digging into her slice of deep, dark, chocolate deliciousness, and I think that's a good start for four.

* Just watch this.

Backpedal

I have to go back and tell you about the party.

What happened was this. I wrote a blog post, in which I talked myself into hosting some kind of Star-Wars party. Then I thought I'd better get my act together quickly before the madness wore off, so I sent some e-vites. I even came up with a witty title: Dash's Sith (I mean 6th) Birthday Party. Then I came back to look at my blog and found that a very lovely, clever, crafty, friend had offered some help with games and such.

So she sent me a page full of ideas, and I said thank you very much and followed her instructions to the letter. It worked out great, and I can take no credit for any of it.

In case you too want to have a low-effort Star Wars party, here are some of the things we did.

We made light sabers for everyone out of halved pool noodles with grey duct tape and blue electrical tape on the ends. (Here are some very detailed instructions.) I made sure they were all blue or green so everyone could be a Jedi.

Then we constructed a very simple obstacle course where the kids had to limbo under a pole (broom handle on top of stacked boxes), walk along a line of tape on the floor, crawl through a tunnel, grab a light saber, and finally give Darth Vader a good whack. (I picked up a 99c Vader mask at the party store and we put it on a balloon on top of a black raincoat and my long black skirt. Nobody doubted its authenticity.)

Next, they had to free Han Solo. I printed a picture of the lovely Han, laminated him with clear packing tape, and froze him in ice in a baking pan. (Don't forget to start this one a couple of days before the party. Freeze a layer of water first, then put in your laminated picture, then one or two more layers on top.) We could see him, but not too clearly, which I thought was just right.

Because it was raining, we started with spoons and little bowls of warm water, but it wasn't much fun. So we went outside anyway and propped Han up in the back of a handy kiddie car under the eaves of our front door. Then we raided our stash of water pistols and the real fun began.

 Sucess at last!

Then we stopped for cake and Yoda Soda. The Yoda Soda was an ice-cream float made of lime sherbet sorbet and Sprite. They also had cheese and crackers and strawberries and melon and chocolate cornflake buns and ice-cream cones.

Afterwards, it was time for fighting stormtroopers - everyone took turns to throw balled-up socks at these menacing little guys, and some lightsaber practice where you try to keep a balloon up in the air with your lightsaber. Mostly there was just bashing each other over the head with pool noodles, but that was okay too.

And then it was time to go home, with a certificate (you can get one here) and a pool noodle and a dollar-store Star Wars jigsaw for everyone; and Mabel, for one, slept until 3am before waking up. Apparently we need to have a Star Wars party every day.

Birthday cake

Cake, I thought. I'm good at cakes. I don't need to just put a bunch of cupcakes in a row and call them a lightsaber. I can make a lightsaber cake.

Hey, self, remember how you don't do fancy cakes? How you're not crafty? How you make delicious traditional round cakes with simple vanilla buttercream or chocolate icing, and deftly wield your little bottle of multicoloured sprinkles, and everyone is quite happy?

So. I said the first to myself. I did not think to add the second until it was too late. Much, much too late.

First I made the cake (Nigella's buttermilk sponge, for just such occasions) in a rectangular pan. I almost fell at the first hurdle by buttering but not papering the pan, and was afraid for a few terrifying minutes that the whole thing had stuck to the bottom, but with a little help from my giant fish-slice, I managed to free the beast.

Then I cut it lengthwise in ever-decreasing thicknesses.

Then I cast about for some way to put it on the table. I taped together several pieces of discarded cereal box, covered in tinfoil. (And they said I wasn't crafty.) And laid out my lightsaber, handle to tip.

I mixed up a lovely batch of buttercream.

The end.

Of the parts that went right, for a while.

Backtrack to the previous day, when I had belatedly decided that I had to buy not just food colouring, but natural food colouring, so as not to send everyone's children home high on Red 40, that evilest of evils. With my stomach still loudly and painfully complaining that no, I was not entirely better yet, I made the entire family drive first to one organic foodstore and then to a second, where I triumphantly exited clutching my three tiny vials of stuff. Red stuff, blue stuff, and yellow stuff, guaranteed to enable me to mix any colour I liked. Visions of a perfectly lifelike silver-and-black-handled green or blue lightsaber cake danced before my eyes. (I may have still been a little feverish too.)

So here we were, the proto-birthday-boy and I, ready to mix our colours. He said he'd like a green lightsaber cake. I pulled a little ceramic eggcup, that had never before seen the light of day since we got it as a wedding present, out of the cupboard, and carefully dripped in one drip of blue. It didn't look very blue, but it wasn't the yellow bottle or the red bottle so it must have been. Then we carefully added one drip of yellow. The yellow was lovely and bright, but my mixture in the bowl was nothing but sludge brown. We added some more yellow. It was still sludgey.

Rather than taint my beautiful buttercream with mud-colour, we decided a blue lightsaber would be fine. Remembering past experience with cochineal (oh, dead red beetles of my past, why are you no longer around to be mushed into natural food colour?), I dripped one sole drip of blue into the sea of cream. Nothing happened. I dripped a couple more drips. Still nothing. The blue did nothing at all. Stupid natural colours made of vegetables. (But really. Have you ever seen a blue vegetable? The yellow is from turmeric or cumin, so it was great, and the red is from beets, but what is the blue from?)

"Purple?" I said. "How about we add a drop of red and it might turn purple?" The boy, bless him, was game. The red worked pretty well, beetles or no. We had lovely pale pink buttercream. If only it was his sister's birthday, I thought. We put in more red. Pinker pink. Half the bottle. Damn pink.

At this point I was stumped. I found my old bottle of Evil Chemical Red and sloshed in some drops of that for good measure. Now it was what you might call definitely dark pink, and I had compromised all my principles, but it didn't seem in any danger of turning red. Dash was getting disheartened. I was too. We decided to take a break and see what Daddy thought when he and Mabel got home.

Daddy thought the pink would be okay. I thought I should go out and buy something. There were three hours to go before the party, and nothing else was done yet. What's a birthday party without a last-minute rush to the shops for something you didn't know you needed?

I went to the local supermarket. No helpful bright blue or green or silver tins of frosting. There were more fake food colourings, but I wasn't sure I was up to more mixing, and I was very vague about how I had been planning to make silver anyway. Silver balls, that's what I need, I thought, with a brainwave. Remember those silver balls that were a decorating staple in days of yore? (Yore being the 70s.) Whatever happened to those? Because apparently they don't sell them any more. Not in my stores, anyway.

I tried a different place, happening into Party City on the way to pick up some paper cups with Yoda on them and a Darth Vader mask - both vital, as it happened, to the party, so it was just as well I'd gone out. By my third stop I had a decision: a jar of red sprinkles (made entirely of Red 40, of course) to make the red icing look redder, and a jar of chocolate sprinkles to make the "black" lines on the handle, which I would just do in plain white buttercream.

I went home; I did the needful. The finished product looked like this.

A little, um, fleshy, perhaps, but the boys didn't complain, and everyone wanted some of the red icing.

But remind me next year, okay? I don't do fancy cakes.

Party line

I'm nearly completely organized. I mean, for the upcoming months, specifically. At the end of April we're going to California for a marathon - I have flights, hotels, and rental car booked. Dash is signed up for a week of gymnastics summer camp (how cool does that sound? I would have so loved to do that - here I am living vicariously - but I think he'll like it too) in July, and I've just about arranged the week at the beach in the summer that I've been promising the kids ever since the nicer weather started.

There's just one thing outstanding. And it's coming up before any of that: Dash's birthday party.

I'm stumped. Everything's different this year, because he's in "big" school, so I don't know the moms of any of his friends any more. I can't just invite everyone over for a big siblings-parents-and-all playdate, because for one thing, six-year-old boys are too old for that, and for another, I don't want to invite a bunch of strangers. I feel like we need a specific thing, but I don't know what that thing is.

I thought of laser tag, which he and his father would love (maybe the latter moreso, truth be told), but the only place that doesn't seem to have a prohibitive age or height limit is 30 minutes away, and they only offer parties for 9 guests (or more). We don't have 8 people to invite, unless we just randomly pick kids he knows (and then where do you stop?), and bringing fewer would make it a two-venue party with cake here and laser tag there, which I can't really do to everyone who would have to ferry their kid around all that much but then not even get to eat the cake. Besides, I'm not entirely sure all his friends' mums would be happy with their peace-loving still-five-year-olds (perhaps) brandishing guns and bloodthirstily peppering their friends with laser beams.

I had great hopes of a bowling party, but Dash didn't want to. I thought of a swimming party at the pool, but our pool doesn't "technically," as the helpful employee behind the desk told me, do those. Despite the fact that we'd just seen one going on.

The thing is, time is advancing. The party needs to be on either the 21st or 22nd of this month, which is a mere two weeks away. (Damn. Two? I've been ostriching on that.) So it's either no party or I just invite the kids over and we think of something on the fly. No party is perfectly reasonable, except that we seem to have got ourselves into this - our kids each have a birthday party every year, and I think all Dash wants is a chance to get his friends together and show them his birthday light sabre and eat cake. Surely I can give him that.

So I think it'll be a Star Wars party, in very little but name. Maybe I can come up with something a bit easier than the very elaborate sew-a-Jedi-cloak-for-each-kid sort of things I've read about on other people's websites. Elaborate is not me. Crafty is not me.

Cupcakes and candles, though, that I can do.

Elephants

When you invite people over for food, it's usually important to have something to eat in the house. Similarly, when you invite friends over for drinks, it's customary to have more than just our usual milk, water, or fruit-and-vegetable juice available. And so it was that I went to the shops again this morning.

B and I, as many people do, spent our twenties expanding our tastes for drinks both fruity and hoppy (though not at the same time), well-chilled or mulled, spicy, bold, well-rounded, Russian, slammed, shot, bubbly, flaming, muddled, colour-changing, or with a slice of clove-studded orange floating in them. Whether it had a nice creamy head or came in a fancy glass, we were probably happy to try it.

Then we had a baby. First there was the ritual giving-up-of-alcohol-during-pregnancy for me. And then the cautious re-introduction of just a little alcohol while nursing. And then we moved from Texas to Maryland and somehow I felt as if we were moving trans-Atlantically and couldn't take anything comestible with us, so I gave away our few bottles of spirits and we arrived here without so much as the makings of a gin-and-tonic to our name.

And thus, almost, we have stayed. We like a beer with dinner, we drink wine now and then, but hard liquor has not been a part of our lives recently. My aunt and uncle stayed with us before Dash turned two, and gifted us with a bottle of gin - for some reason - when they left. It has - I kid you not - sat unopened in the freezer ever since.

(B would like to point out that that's not strictly true. We've only lived in this house for 18 months. Before that, it sat unopened in the freezer in our old house. And there was probably some period when it was in transit from one freezer to the other and therefore was in no freezer at all.)

My point still stands. We're pathetic, that's what. I had great intentions of having gins-and-tonic this summer, because what could be more refreshing, right? But then I was stuck looking for tonic water that didn't have high-fructose corn syrup in it, because I couldn't believe that was necessary. And when I finally found it, in the organic supermarket, I couldn't believe it was that expensive, so I didn't buy it. B eventually circumvented all this by going out one day a few months ago and just picking up a bottle of Schweppes, HFCS and all, and that has sat unopened in the fridge ever since.

So today we said, "Right. Let us have on hand this Christmas the makings of cosmopolitans. And maybe bellinis."

I went to the supermarket that has alcohol. I needed more sugar for icing the Christmas cake anyway (more on that in a few days, I promise) and more bread for Dash's interminable peanut-butter sandwiches (guess what he's having for Christmas dinner?), and a bottle of wine for the day that will be in it, since we've already started into the one I got before. (Note to self: should stock up with more than one wine bottle at a time. Maybe need to throw a party so people will bring us wine.) I got a lime, for the cosmo's. I got peach juice for the bellinis. We already have a bottle of prosecco in the fridge that needs to be used.

Then I realised the supermarket-with-alcohol doesn't stock spirits. So I got back into the car and drove to the liquor shop. At least this isn't Pennsylvania, where no supermarkets have any alcohol at all, and you can't even buy beer and wine in the same establishment. And nothing on Sundays.

I picked up a bottle of Guinness to make beef-and-Guinness stew with for Christmas-Eve dinner. And a bottle of vodka for the cosmopolitans. I contemplated the Cointreau, but it was too expensive. (I have only just now looked at that link up there and discovered that's meant to go in the cosmo too. I think we used to make them without.) Where's duty-free when you need it? When will we ever be travelling light enough to think it's a good idea to add a heavy glass bottle to our luggage on the way home from the airport?

I came home. We still need at least cranberry juice for the cosmo's, and there are only two beers left in the fridge. Entertaining will have to wait for another trip to the supermarket. In the meantime, would anyone like a bellini? I think we'll be having some with our bacon and pancakes on Christmas morning.

Mabel raiding someone else's Christmas drinks stash two years ago

This time I mean it

But first, some administrative stuff. Have you noticed my new thingy? Yes, it's lovely, isn't it? Oh, and also, I have a clever whatsit now that picks out four related posts, with or without pictures, and links to them at the bottom of every post. I'm not sure if it uses the tags, or possibly magic, but I love that it's giving some love to lesser-spotted posts, and personally I have found when I saw such a thing on other friends' blogs, that it drew me in and brought me to lots more interestingness, so I hope it does the same for you.

And then, when I was thinking about how to lure you people in and enmesh you in my fascinating word-tangles - I mean, how best to serve your needs as readers - I decided to do away with the silly and self-perpetuating "Popular recent posts" section in the margin and instead make a new page called Cliff Notes, which lists a few of my favourite blog posts and serves as a sort of potted history of what's been going on here and what I like to write about.

If you'd like to nominate a post to go there, I'm always open to suggestions, by the way.

(Cliff Notes, for my non-American readers, are those yellow-and-black-covered summary texts you can buy so that you don't have to read the whole book. Not that I've ever owned any such thing.)

See the link over there under the About Me section? There it is.

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That's enough of that.

I vowed not to mention this until we were at least a week in, but then I changed my mind. So what if I end up eating my words (again) in two days' time? Will you scorn me? And will I know? Will you stop reading entirely because I jumped the gun and blogged about something without giving it due thought and process? Well, fine, I never liked you anyway.

No, not you. Come back. You don't even know what I'm going to say yet.

On Sunday, which was exactly one month after her third birthday, I said to Mabel, "Let's put on your new dress for your friend's party," and she said to me, "I want to wear underpants." And I did not stand upon the order of my going, but went at once and fetched said underpants from the ranks of their brethern where they have been waiting patiently ever since June, being the last time she was potty "trained". I also took with us a spare pair, and a pullup, and an extra outfit just in case, because I'm not thick, me.

Luckily, the host is a wonderful, laid-back mother who greeted my news of an undefended bottom on arrival with "It's not a party until someone's peed their pants." Indeed. And Mabel successfully came to me twice and had me take her to the bathroom, before the third time telling me that she had indeed peed her pants just a little. That was pretty good going for a birthday party, and I certainly wasn't swooping down on her to check every ten minutes, because there was wine and spinach puffs and entertaining people to talk to and my son wasn't hiding under my legs like last year - he was happily playing with the birthday boy's brand-new robot and eating his weight in potato chips.

Yesterday I casually produced more underpants with the day's clothes, not sure how it would go down, but she was happy to put them on and tell everyone at school, at the top of her voice, that she was wearing underwear. She came home dry, wearing the same thing she'd set out in, and then proceded to motor through four pairs of bottoms in about two hours.

This may be the pattern for a while yet. Today I was all set to announce, in foolhardy manner, that this was it, no turning back, pullups for bedtime only... and then she took an extra-long nap, woke up soaked, and tearfully demanded a diaper for the rest of the afternoon.

Like I said the last time Ted, it won't happen again.

Post-party

This morning, once the kids were at school, I was planning to do nothing. Maybe take a nap. Maybe just read an actual book. (Probably one I've read many times before, so it wouldn't be too challenging.) Have a cup of coffee in peace. That sort of thing. There's play-doh smushed into the carpet, new toys that have yet to be assigned homes strewn about, serving dishes waiting to be washed, thank-you cards to start on, and I'm sure the laundry is piling up again, but I was going to ignore all that.

Then I took Mabel to school and somebody asked me if I'd mind awfully switching my co-op day with them, because they had meetings all day at work and hadn't realised that today they were supposed to be helping at school. I suppose I could have said that my mother-in-law is coming on Friday and I have a house to clean and a shopping list as long as your arm, but while those things are true it wasn't exactly an accurate representation of my plans for the morning, so I suckered up and stayed.

The party went well, thank you. The children played, the adults drank wine and beer, everyone ate and said nice things about the food. We spirited most of the presents upstairs before Mabel could demand to open them right away, and there were hardly any fights over dolls or lego trains. After the cake we opened the back door and let them loose to frolic in the large pile of leaves our back garden so kindly provides at this time of year. As the light dimmed, I looked vaguely out the window and thought I should take a photo, but I didn't get round to it.

 

Mabel had a new dress. She took off her new shoes before the guests arrived, and put them back on the wrong feet, and wore them that way for the rest of the evening. Whatever. It's her party, she can do what she wants to.

This is my favourite cake for birthdays. Probably because Nigella calls it "Birthday Sponge," and I have no imagination. You have to track down Bird's Custard Powder for it, which might be more or less difficult depending on which side of the Atlantic you live on, but it's totally worth it.

I decided that we needed butterfly buns. They're a staple of Irish birthday parties, but they were new to my neighbours. Take an undecorated cupcake, slice the top off and split it in half. Dollop cream (or buttercream) on the flat top, and stick the two pieces back in at an angle, to make the wings. Decorate with strawberry quarters, or candy, or whatever you like.

This was the finished spread, just before it was dismantled. We have pigs in blankets (mini-sausages wrapped in Pillsbury crescent roll dough), peanut-butter-and-jelly fingers, butterfly buns, pita chips, chocolate cornflake buns (melted Mars Bar [Milky Way in the US] mixed with cornflakes - another classic with a twist from Nigella), lemon ricotta muffins, grapes, and - last-minute gotta-hava-vegetable: baby carrots. Also present: hummus, salsa, ranch dip, M&Ms, mini marshmallows.

A lot of the mini muffins were left over, but that's okay - they freeze well. I think I made too many yellow things, but I was trying hard to steer away from the chocolate end of the spectrum.

Onward and upward. Tomorrow I have to start thinking about guests, Thanksgiving, and even Christmas. Or maybe I'll just read a book.

Ten reasons to host a birthday party

1. Leftover cake.

2. Getting the countertops cleared off for the first time since your last party.

3. A perfectly valid excuse to drink champagne in the middle of the afternoon.

4. Enabling the two-year-old to acquire a new baby without actually having to buy her one.

5. There's no point hoovering beforehand, and afterwards you can really see the crumbs so you're more motivated to do it.

6. Paintings are now on the wall instead of on the floor leaning against the wall.

7. Moving all cardboard boxes out of the main part of the house. Even the Very Important Cardboard that had been made into wings. If he doesn't miss it before Tuesday, it's recycling.

8. You hardly ever look in the basement anyway.

9. How good the cup of tea tastes when everyone's gone home and you're basking in the glow of a party well thrown.

10. Leftover cake. For breakfast.

House warmed, despite a/c

Here I sit, quite tired, and so pathetic that when faced with the choice between a second beer and a Diet Coke, I went with the Coke. We've just said goodnight to the last guests of our housewarming and put the kids to bed. (At least, child 2 is conked out, totally exhausted from all the excitement coupled with a nap that was both short and early and child 1 is being shepherded towards sleep by his father, who will probably drop off first, by the relative looks of them as they left my orbit.)

Posting has been light lately because B sodded off to a conference in Toronto for six days, leaving me to not only keep the children alive and entertained and fed and all that jazz but also try to keep the house clean and respectable and organised so that he could waltz back here last night and then host a party this afternoon. Doing all that left me with not a lot of extra time for fripperies like blog posts. And to be fair, said waltzing involved attending to a long to-do list this morning that had arisen, spontaneous-like, in his absence, and then he had to take the kids swimming to tire them out. On the other hand, since he has spent all week being able to lie in (relatively) if he so desired and socialising with his work buddies (sorry, listening to important talks and networking) whereas I've been getting up at the crack of dawn, cleaning the house, watching far too much PBS Kids and then (sigh) doing all the unplugging of small appliances before going to bed, I don't have all that much sympathy for him.

Anyway, today was the culmination, wherein I got to do some baking and take out the colourful bowls and fill them with snacky things and introduce some friends to some other friends, and show people round the house so they could compliment me on my choice of paint colours. The weather was too hot and sticky to go outside, so sadly we didn't get to use the croquet set we'd procured specially for the occasion. Not as many people came as I might have liked, but if everyone had come we would have been totally sardined indoors. And when you throw a party in the last week of June, you have to expect that a lot of people won't make it and not get all adolescently nobody-likes-me about it. Even the college kids from next door dropped in to drink some water and tell me how much nicer our house is than theirs. We traded cartoon recommendations and I told them they should watch some Phinneas and Ferb. (They looked so young. B and I were that age when we first met. How is that possible? How on earth did I get it so right at such a preposterously early age? Dumb luck? Predestination? Common sense? Crazy love?)

Kids ran in circles and screamed and accidentally locked themselves in the bedroom (and screamed) and had the occasional meltdown and acquired small injuries (and screamed), and all the child-free couples gathered themselves on the other side of the house and talked about... well, I'm not sure actually because, while I would have loved to engage in the grown-up conversation, I was mostly replenishing pita chips or adjudicating meltdowns or distributing juice boxes or wondering where one or other of my children were. Such is life.

When there were just a few of us left we ordered pizza. It was a nice party, I think. We have a lot of recycling to put out, and plenty of beer left in the fridge, and quite a few new bottles of wine, and even two new houseplants. Win/win, I think. (Except for the plants, which I will surely kill in due course.)

Randomness

Ten weeks, four days.

Clearly an update is overdue. And we won't even mention my lovely paper diary with its delightful stripy cover and about three pathetic little entries. Well, it was an experiment that didn't pan out, that's all. Apparently updating online is easier for me, and updating in two places was just confusing.

(My memory, by the way and not even when influenced by pregnancy, is appalling. I'm watching Matt Damon on Inside The Actor's Studio and they've just shown a clip from The Good Shepherd. I know I've seen it, and I recognised the clip, and I have no clue what it was about. I get a lot of mileage out of reruns and re-reads, as you can imagine.)

These days I feel queasy a bit and it's been a lean weekend for poor B in terms of dinners, since I couldn't really muster the interest to plan anything for Friday, Saturday or Sunday nights. (In my defence, I was busy planning and making cupcakes for a two-year-old's birthday party, which took up all my food planning brain cells. Also, the party filled us up pretty well for Saturday night.) Then we had 5 Guys burgers on Friday evening and I had indigestion all night, so I decided I'd rather go to bed a little empty than too full. Basically, I haven't got to a part of the pregnancy where the baby actually needs extra food, and I'm not nursing enough for it to be going that way.

Monkey was sick the previous weekend and it took a week to get his sleep and eating back to normal, but I think we're back on track now. Today he had (and loved) peanut butter for the first time.

(Who is this Kimora person? And why should I care? Oh wow, there's going to be another season of Top Cut. No, what was it called? Project Shag? Step it up and Bang? Shear Genius, that was it. You wouldn't believe how long it just took me to remember that.)

Right. I have thank-you cards to write and photos to send to grandparents. And early bed to go to.
Matt Damon. Good. Mmm.