stinky feet

5/14/2009-JP's 3rd birthday....I scheduled it for 4:30 on Thursday, his actual birthday, assuming that it would be such an odd time that few people would show up. 19 kids and at least 40 adults were there. Wine and cake were everywhere. Steel was staggering around at the end of it shoving cake in her mouth from every plate she saw and grabbing half empty juice boxes, ripping the straws out, arching her back to coax out any remaining drops, crushing the boxes in her hands as she sucked. I hope it wasn't a a foreshadowing of her future behavior at 2 am in some frat house, but I fear the worst. Jack Peter was as gracious as a 3 year old recipient of 35 presents could be, but it wasn't pretty....

So we survived Jack Peter's 4th birthday party. A glutton for punishment, I approached it much like I did last year. I scheduled it for 5:30 pm on his actual birthday...a Friday. I cleared all the furniture out of a room and put pillows, mattresses and blow up beds in there with all of the linens in the house. Real bouncy castles are expensive and kids have to wait their turns because there's a limit on the number of children and the blower thing is really loud. My way, no one has to wait, and it almost ensures us an exciting trip to the ER. Tim dutifully used every drop of helium in the BJ's tank to blow up 50 balloons. I made another ridiculous cake. There were 3 cases of beer, lots of juice packets, cheese balls and carrots.

I'm the only one who lost her mind...An hour before the party I went to get plates at the Asian grocery store thinking that I'm going to be throwing a lot of these parties in my life, so I might as well have unbreakable plates for everyone because throw away plates upset me, and I can't let that much of my pottery get broken. I lost my car keys at the store. I still don't know where I left them. It was sometime after Steel came up to me clutching a slippery quart glass jar of kim chee (korean pickled cabbage) or maybe while Jack Peter was climbing on the stack of 25 plastic kid chairs reaching for the plungers...After a 1/2 hour of hysterically searching, having banished the kids to the car (running out every 5 minutes to make sure they were still there) a woman brought the keys to me. I couldn't understand her well enough to figure out where I'd left them. I refrained from invoking any fake Chinese. My friend, Sarah, had "fluent in fake Chinese" at the bottom of her resume.

The bouncy room ended up smelling like stinky feet. How can kids this young smell bad? If I was worried about last year's party foreshadowing my childrens' future frat party behavior, this year tops it. 2 out of the 3 manic naked kids streaking around at the end of the evening were mine. I finally got to relax and take the balloons out of my hair. (Jack Peter wanted me to look like a bug by attaching 2 green balloons to my head.) It was probably the first kid party any adults enjoyed only because my mom was there and told me that I'd be cruel if I didn't let them all watch the Flyers game. She was right.
I tried to wind down the kids by putting on a movie. That was about as successful as putting the Flyers on to wind down the adults...