I was up early yesterday and called my sister to ask if she needed me to come early to help do anything for Gigi’s party. She let out a big sigh and said “Yes, please…” so I told her I’d be off once I hopped in the shower and got ready. Little gigi has been looking forward to her 4th birthday party since, well… since her little brother turned the big O-N-E in the summer - so, about six months now. Back then it was the middle of summer and when she saw her mom sending out birthday invites she decided she was going to make her OWN birthday party invites. I was one of the first ones invited six months ago… you know, just to make sure I kept the date open with my busy social life:P
She invited her favourite boy in her class - his name is Carston and she has a total sing-song falsetto voice when she says his name that I’m sure gives her parents a bit ‘oh god no’ moment when they take that quick glimpse into the future, before trying to bleach their brains of the flickers of thought. Carston was the only boy invited, except of course for her brother and her cousin and when he showed up he was all dapper in a shirt and tie and he was super shy and quiet. I’m not sure if it was all the boisterous girls that were there or if he was just the shy, quiet type. If it was the latter, I think she is falling into her mother’s and my footsteps - for some reason I always had crushes on the shy, quiet, pensive boys - ha, right? Shut up. It’s true. Her dad is kind of shy and quiet too, until you get to know him and then he opens up more. My sister and I are kind of anything but quiet, or maybe it’s just in contrast to them that we seem so ‘not’ quiet. I do have my quiet moments, quite a lot of them actually but I don’t want to get side-tracked here.
HELLO-KITTY-PARTY!
She had invited some friends from school and her old-best friend Stella from her daycare and Stella’s sister Lucy. They were super shy little girls too that hung around their parents most of the time I think because, they didn’t know any other kids there except for Gigi. One little girl cried when her mom tried to leave so her mom stayed, but that wasn’t a problem because most of the kids had a tag-along parent in attendance. I’m not sure when this became a ‘thing’ or maybe it’s just because they are still pre-k age but I don’t remember my parents coming along to my friend’s parties when I was little.
I was in charge of doing some crafts with the kids before they ate, so I had them sit on the living room floor and say their names first, even though most of them new each other, I thought it would a good idea for Stella and Lucy and her cousins. The first craft of the day was Glitter Slime. Basically you mix glitter glue with a water/borax solution and it makes some pretty neat slime. I had a feeling it was going to be a huge fail when my sister said she wasn’t actually following the instructions. I know the instructions because she emailed me the link weeks ago and told me to ‘get ready’. Get ready? Get ready for what? For you to change what you’re doing and not even TRY IT OUT YOURSELF FIRST? I had to laugh. It figures. Instead of making a huge chunk of glitter by immersing it in a bowl my sister thought she would put the glue in little paper cups with popsicle sticks and I’d walk around putting spoons full of the water/borax solution in their individual cups so they could stir. Personally I thought this kind of defeated the point since the ‘fun’ of glitter slime is squishing it in your fingers but I guess my sister’s reasoning was that she wanted each kid to be able to make their own slime.
Well, it was kind of a disaster. LOL. When the kids started stirring, there were some oooohs and aaaahs as the transformation began so I encouraged them to stick their hands in and mush it around a bit. This emphatically did NOT have the desired effect. Their hands got all gluey after about 5 seconds and then there was a chorus of “I want to go wash my hands!!” as they all tried to squish in the bathroom all at once. Poor Carston was sitting down still silently trying to get his slime to ‘slime’ but it had kind of gone right past the slime stage into the ‘hard glue’ stage which is okay, you are supposed to be able to fix that by adding a bit more water. From the bathroom. Where all the other kids were already trying to cram into. So, that little craft honestly took about 3 minutes from start to finish, I think it took longer for them all to file into the bathroom to wash their hands.
My sister was kind of frazzled because I could tell she was expecting it to take longer while they oohed and aahed and played with their slime but they were totally over it. It was then my BIL snuck out to go get the pizzas for lunch. I did a silent prayer that the ribbon wands would go over better and it wouldn’t take him long to bring back the pizza.
I’m sure at this point my sister was re-thinking her idea to nix the pin-the-nose-on-hello-kitty I had suggest and doctored up for her and sent via email the week before. Oh well, on with the show.
The ribbon wands. Oh, THE RIBBONS WANDS!! They were a smashing success! I had them sit on the floor again and I handed them all a wooden dowel ‘wand’ with an eye hook pre-fastened that my sister had done, so all that was really left was to put a big bowl of ribbons on the floor and have them all each pick out four ribbons. I told them if they knew how to make a knot, they could tie their own on or to grab an adult to help them. It almost seemed like magic! Attach one ribbon to the end of the dowel and Ooooooooooooooooooooohhh! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! - they were pretty mesmerized. They were all prancing around the room sashaying their ribbon wands around, even Carston. Since I was down on the floor with them, still working on tying some of the ribbons on wands, Vienna, another little girl decided to turn me into a princess, complete with gown and everything. This delighted Lydia so they started waving their wands over my head and a bit too vigorous in their glee, knocked me on the head a couple times with the dowels. It was okay though, I’m a resilient princess.
They had a great time for about ten minutes until they started wandering into other parts of the house. With no other crafts planned I decided to host an impromptu game of Duck, Duck, Goose. Well.... Carston and Stella and Lucy and someone else who’s name escapes me, didn’t want to play. The little toddlers were out so that left a grand total of four left who wanted to play.
So I asked them all to sit down in a circle. Their circle consisted of pretty much a straight line. I suppose you could call it a bit of an arch if you were optimistic enough and squinted really hard.
“Let’s make a circle guys!” I said in my cheeriest face.
They shifted a little and a-ha! An honest to goodness arch.
“Closer in a circle,” I coaxed.
They looked at each other sort of puzzed.
This was not working. I totally understood their frustration in their little heads. A kid circle usually has way more kids than FOUR! I figured I would have to ‘splain things easier for them. I told them all to squish together and told the end two to touch knees. We now had a very sad circle of four. However, they had loads of fun. In was in the room where they parents were chatting and having coffee so they were watching and laughing which I think urged the kids a bit to ham it up perhaps. It was all good.
The pizza arrived and they ate and my job was over.
Her presents mainly consisted of getting hello kitty STUFF. But she did get a couple of princess gowns including a Sophia the First complete with gloves, tiara and shoes. The two girls that were stragglers at the end of the party dressed up as did Gigi and we have three honest to goodness tiara’d princesses in the house for a while.
It was all a pretty great party. I have neglected to tell parts of it though. We actually had three birthdays in the house that day. Gigi, whose actually birthday is today and her mom’s and uncle’s who are twins. Their birthday was ACTUALLY yesterday so some gifts were quietly passed back and forth to the adult birthday’ers. My older nibling of my brothers..... SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH.
I was hoping he would behave but he’s just kind of a hyper kid. When we were eating, I grabbed a plate and went to sit on a chair in the living room. It had two little pieces of pizza on it with no one sitting on it so I moved them and sat. No sooner had I sat down than I hear a whiny pitch from boy nibling #1 (I have yet to name him… nothing I think of right now is very nice). So of COURSE, he runs to my brother to say that I AM IN HIS SPOT. A minute of whining pursues before I just get up and sit on the floor. Still the chair sits empty. No thank you for moving from either him or his parents. Just silence. Two minutes later his little sister spies the empty chair and he begins to whine again but only half-heartedly… I mean, she’s not ME so full whine mode isn’t called for apparently.
While gift-giving my brother’s little girl who just turned two started to have a melt-down because she wanted to ‘help’ give their gift to Gigi but her brother did it instead. So she sat and cried a bit on her mom’s lap until I said, Hey honey, do you want to give Gigi MY present. She smiled and nodded so I grabbed my gift bag and gave it to her and she smiled and held it so she could ‘help’. Her mom sat there, no thank you… no nothing. SIGH.
I noticed my brother a couple times throughout the party. It made me sad. He just seems.... so tired. So lost. So not ‘in the game’ anymore. His son doesn’t listen to him and instead of parenting and tough love he just seems to sigh like he’s resigned from it all. It makes me sad, it really does. But it also pisses me off. You can’t just ‘not deal with it’ - you can’t just not ‘sign off’ from being ‘present’. Your kids are 5 and 2 for god’s sake. Just wait until they are teenagers. You have a long, long haul so you best put your batman underoos on and deal with it. These are all things I of course didn’t say. It WAS his birthday after all, even if it wasn’t his party.
So all in all, a bit of happy and a bit of not-so-happy. I would chalk the day up to one thumbs up. Not quite the perfect two thumbs but come on, when dealing with family aren’t ALL families like that?? That’s sort of rhetorical. If you have a happy-go-lucky, alway awesome family, well then, you sort of suck and I’m a bit envious and maybe it’s best you just not say anything:)
I have no awesome way to end this post so I’ll just say cake. Mmm, cake. It really WAS good:)
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