I am the mother of a teenager

My husband is kind of a badass.

There is a big place in my heart for the foiled marksman on the far right.
He's clearly a born pacifist. His strengths lie in the kitchen. He's an excellent cook 
👨🏻‍🍳🌈💚

It was going to be hard to top JP's 12th birthday party at the shooting range. Yes, of course a couple of parents/kids excused themselves from the expedition in the wake of our nation's disastrous relationship with firearms, but it was pretty cool to have an ex-marine treat the subject with the perfect amount of severity, calm, prowess and fun. The kids who didn't want to shoot met us after at a Korean BBQ place. Having been at the new school for less than a year, I knew neither the parents of JP's new friends nor the friends themselves, but I did know that all of them had phones, and I'd been told at various parent gatherings that it's really hard to get them interested in anything that doesn't involve a screen. Finally, the shadow of the unbelievably extravagant Penn Charter Bar/Bat Mitzvah parties loomed large. I could have sent an evite with cupcakes on it, but why would I do that when the opportunity to be a humiliating, over-sharing, hippy mom presented itself after a couple glasses of wine?

This was the "save the date" sent on April 15 at 9:12 pm:

🎬

Plans are a bit SKETCHY 

at the moment, 

BUT we are trying to suss out:

SATURDAY May 18th 

for a birthday party for JP.

♉️

Now….in the wake of all of these extravagant and fabulous 

bar/bat mitzvah parties, 

I’m asking that the bar 

go down a few notches.

🎈📌

📉⤵️🎢

🙏

JP has (shockingly) suggested meeting at an ICE RINK to skate ⛸

and then returning to our house in W. Mt. Airy  for food/chaos.  

(Hosting chaos is one of my hidden talents…

or maybe not-so-hidden) 

I’m not sure about procuring an ice rink in May, 

and what is the allure for JP in its procurement.

(I suspect he’s discovered ice to be 

an extremely successful venue for his 

comedic eschewing of grace and athleticism.)

Let me know if your kid/twins are 

available/interested

Happy Monday.✋

🍡🎂🎈

Liz (and TIM)

(I’m going to be celebrating finally having a reason 

for my prematurely grey hair…I’ll have a TEENAGER!)

🧓🏻

Here was the actual invite sent of May 2 at 10:19 pm:

🎈📌JP's 13th birthday...

SATURDAY MAY 18 2pm

We will be hosting JP’s birthday party AT OUR HOUSE

🙀

We have been thwarted 

at every turn on our quest for appropriate

13-year-old birthday entertainment:

Wissahickon Skate Club….closed for renovations.

The rec center rinks...no longer open on weekends

Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift both CANCELLED

Last year we went to a shooting range, so

for a hot minute. we got super-excited about ax throwing.

It turns out that these trendy ax-throwing places 

have age requirements

🙄

Bungee jumping off of the Ben Franklin bridge is passé; we did that when he turned 8.

We’ve moved onto 

a "sanctioned graffiti" party

JP is having a "Greg Brady moment.” 

Do you remember when Greg left the room with Bobby and Peter and moved into the attic, and he put up beaded curtains? 

(Yes, I’m making a Brady Bunch reference here.) 
JP is planning on moving into the basement, and he wants his walls to be covered with edgy graffiti.

I’m insane, 

but I’m not going to let a bunch of 13 year olds loose in my basement with spray paint.

We ARE going to give them masks and gloves and panels to spray paint OUTSIDE

The panels will then off-gas for the entire summer outside.

Come fall JP will have a hip boy cave.

If it’s hot and sunny I might take them (by force) to the Wissahickon for a swim or hike or something.

If it’s wretched out, I don’t know what we’ll do.

We will feed them, and we will have beverages for parents if they’d like a cold one at pick up time.

Liz Kinder/Tim McDonald

6950 Cresheim Road

267 235 5820

I think he actually wants beaded curtains now

🍡🎂🎈

Tim was in charge of the spray painting logistics. He bought and cut the panels. He lined the area in front of the garage with tarps. The goal was that the deck remain paint-free as would the organic vegetables growing adjacent to the spray paint grotto. Tim's Virgo attention to detail sealed off the area pretty well. Who knew that the kids were going to take off their masks, run out into the street, and spray paint their socks, legs and shoes? He did his best.

I now understand that kids have shorter attention spans than I do. 97% of the adults in the world have a shorter attention span than do I if it involves any sort of art or craft. I could easily dye Easter eggs for a week straight and not get bored. I will never forget the day my mom brought home finger paints for my brother and me. She set us up outside on the picnic table. I was enraptured. The allure of the paint needs no explanation, but I rarely got to do things with my brother, 4 years my senior. We are very different humans, and he understandably had little interest in hanging out with his little sister. After 8 seconds he said, "I'm done with mine." He is an engineer who isn't fond of getting his hands dirty. He famously walked into the San Francisco apartment I shared with another potter and a florist and surveyed the trash-picked, polka-dot-painted furniture saying, "That is the sign of someone with WAY too much time on her hands." My response was, "Are you kidding me? Look at all the chairs in the world that don't have polka dots on them! We are SO BUSY!!!!!" He muttered, "That is a fundamentally different way of looking at the world." My 7th-grade-graffiti-party-throwing self remembered that crestfallen 5 year old who just wanted to finger-paint with purple paint all day with her older brother. I knew we needed a back up plan to the spray painting to ensure that 16 13-year-old kids would not be sitting around my house looking at their phones and eating Asian junk food. (JP is into anime, so I bought a bunch of crap at the Korean grocery store. It disappeared in seconds.)

May 17 10:32 pm

My final missive to the parents of JP's friends:

OK, My headcount is 16 🙀

including JP 

If I’ve forgotten your child, let me know.

Corbin  Grace A

Coleman Hadley

Eli M. Harper

Eli P.  Helena

Elijah Savanah

Mikey Bella

Mac Kate

Owen

I’ve done Martha Stewart proud; I almost have an even boy/girl split!

If Steel and a friend step in, it’ll be perfect!

Maybe we should have a couples dancing/"Doris Day tribute" portion of the party!!!!!

I’m sure they’d all LOVE that.

Here is my actual, ambitious plan:

We are going to prime and spray paint 8 panels for JP’s new room.

At Helena’s urging we will have individual panels for people to take home.  

(I like the DIY party favor idea; thank you Helena.)

If they get rammy, I might send them on an "Acme scavenger hunt."  

(Acme is 2 blocks away.)  

I’ll arm them with those annoying Monopoly coupons and make them find and purchase all of the “instant winner” and "$.42 off” products.  

If you have any spare monopoly coupons, send them my way.  

I will devise some sort of prize for 

speed, accuracy and creativity.

You can grab your kid anytime after 5; We will have beer/wine 

if you want to enjoy our probably-covered-with-spray-paint deck with us. 

JP is hoping that parents will hang around, 

so he can have an "inappropriate movie" portion of the festivities.  

(On my brother's 13th birthday, my mom didn’t have a plan for 9-year-old me,

so she brought me along with my brother and his friends to see Animal House in the theater.

Clearly this has had a lasting effect on me.)

Where is the toga emoji when I need it???

We are around all night, so pick up time is flexible.

Wish me luck.

Happy Friday.

Liz

The spray paint portion of the party was great. JP and his PC posse are aggressive champions of the non-binary gender issue and are emotional advocates for the FGBTQ community. (I've probably forgotten a letter in there; it seems to change all the time.) As you can see, the painted panels reflected this fixation. There were kids who had zero interest in spray painting at all, and even the ones who did finished in under an hour. I was right to devise a "Plan B." 

The scavenger hunt devolved into a Lord of the Flies situation. I was dumbfounded. Each member of the winning team would receive the prize: a jar of Nutella with JP's face taped onto it and a pack of Orbit gum. By far, the most aggressive female competitor was also allergic to tree nuts and thus had no use for a jar of Nutella, but she wanted to WIN. Her male competitive counterpart is a twin brother to JP's friend, Cate. JP has nothing against this guy, but they run in VERY different circles. Mac is a jock; JP is not, but Mac heard about the spray paint and wanted to go to JP's party. If their mom is anything like me, she will happily take advantage of any opportunity to get rid of both children with one car ride. Mac is a big fan of winning. Until I got to know Cate better and realized that she's tough, I wondered, after meeting her brother, if she'd ever gotten a toy or a boob or anything for the first few years of her life. Harper and Mac set the tone for the hunt.

In order to pepper the mostly-Penn-Charter party with JP's old GWCS crew, I made the 4 guys from GWCS team captains. In hindsight, this was a flawed idea because all of the team leaders were then male. The teams had 4 distinct personalities: the super-competitive, Machiavellian, lie, cheat, steal team with both Harper and Mac on it captained by Owen, the marksman in the above, shooting range photo who inflicted an impressive number of head wounds on his target; (who was incidentally the victim of one of our worst parenting mistakes...ever, but that's another story) the hardworking, athletic, healthily competitive but ethical team captained by Owen's twin brother, Cole, the cook and shooting range pacifist. My money would have gone on Cole's team. He's a leader; he knows his way around the grocery store, and he and all of his teammates could (and did) run at an 8-minute-mile pace. There was the all-girl team who had no interest in the hunt lead by captain Eli who has a hard time speaking to girls; and there was the super-mature-kid team who were in it because they were at the party, and a trip to Acme might mean more junk food. Massive Michael, who, because of his life trajectory and his physical size, is essentially a full-grown man was the mature team's captain. 

These were my favorites of the "little JP's." I wonder how long those little pictures are going to stay on the plate and the doll's head.

The objective points were based on: finding all 8 of the little JP's around the house. Purchasing all of the crap at ACME with the $20 I gave each team and the 5 coupons. And getting back the fastest. My favorite of JP's new friends said to me, "Wait a minute; are you just making us do your grocery shopping????" As my dad would say, there are no flies on that girl. It wasn't exactly my shopping, but I do like to hold corporations to it when they offer weird free things. Finding items in the grocery store that I would never normally purchase is not easy for me. My grocery store navigation skills suck; I suspect that they move everything regularly to keep me there longer, and I'm demoralized the whole time because I know that the concept of my holding Acme's feet to the fire by taking advantage of all of the monopoly coupons for mint Oreo cookies and generic canned corn is completely without merit. But it was a perfect use of the time of a bunch of screen-obsessed 13 year olds. The subjective "points" were judged by JP. Each team had to use their change to buy him a little weird Acme gift, and each team had to come up with a clever name.

One of the mature team's coupons was for $.50 off an antacid. I thought it was like TUMS, and I'd give them to my mom. It turned out to be a $24 product, so that team had an impossible task from the get go. Another team could not get their heads around the "little present for JP." Instead of buying a toy up front for a quarter or a candy bar, they bought him a $7 greeting card. They didn't have enough money, so a stranger lent it to them. That was definitely not my intention. Mac, son of TWO lawyers, was standing on the counter in our kitchen arguing passionately that the greeting card purchased by the athletic/ethical team was, in fact, homophobic. It was too loud for me to follow his logic, but I'd definitely choose him to litigate on my behalf. His team, meanwhile, had briefly stolen my "little JP answer key" in desperation when the top placed 2 teams were frantically searching for the same, last little JP.

This was the "little JP" that flummoxed everyone

Notice the name on the sauce :)

The Machiavellian team won. I suspect because their 4th member was Helena, JP's favorite. It was rigged from the start! They all went to watch a movie in the basement and eat more crap. Coleman, the ethical, athletic team leader isn't a fan of sitting on a couch on a gorgeous day watching a movie. As I was gardening, he was circling around on his bike. He was clearly a little upset. He asked me, "Honestly, Liz, which team would YOU have chosen to win?" I told him that the other team should have been disqualified, and I really liked the name his team had come up with which was: "Acme? More like ACNE!" I think Coleman was satisfied with that answer, so, in the end, a good time was had by all.