Elizabeth's 5th Birthday

A few months ago, my friend Amanda sent me an email with the subject line: "My new obsession - party blogs!" and the links to some of these blogs. I proceeded to spend the next four hours of my life in the kind of trance that only happens to people mentally trying to figure out how to best match festive personalized water bottle labels to the ribbon on the cupcake tower, stopping only to jump over to etsy to look at custom pinatas. I won't link to these blogs here in case I end up making fun of them, but email me or Amanda if you want the links.

A typical entry in one of these party blogs might begin:

For Anna Claire's 4th birthday, we had a Mad Hatter tea party. To make the Royal Croquet Court, I cut the 4' King and Queen of Hearts out of plywood and drilled rebar into the base.

So when I read the party blogs, I feel kind of the same way I feel when I read the Martha Stewart Homekeeping Handbook - awestruck, scornful, inspired, scared, and defeated - and yet somehow I can't look away.

Because I really really REALLY love planning parties. Especially children's parties. And baby showers. I am so glad that I still have some young friends who aren't finished birthin' yet, because I don't know what I'll do when I have nobody to make a diaper cake for. I'm a complete sucker for a theme, and somehow themes seem to work best with children's parties. I did make David a snowman cake for his birthday one year (I have a related obsession with Nordic Ware novelty cake pans), but the theme pretty much began and ended with the snowman cake. But with children's parties, you can have the snowman cake, snowman treat bags, pin the corn cob pipe on the snowman, snowman yard art, "snow," snow cream pops, and an igloo made of styrofoam blocks. There are really no limits to the excessiveness. (Although I like to think that I will never host a party that requires me to break out the power tools. If I can just stay on that side of the line, it'll be okay.)

So I love planning parties, and Elizabeth is really at the perfect age for a fun party. The problem is, her birthday falls right after Christmas, so I usually end up scrambling to throw together a party for her (this never happens to the party bloggers, who plan their parties months in advance). So I kind of had to scramble to put her party together, as usual, and I ended up making a bunch of stuff because I didn't have time to order it. That's okay - sometimes it just feels good to have scissors in one hand and a glue stick in the other.

The party theme was "Princess Tea Party." This married two of Elizabeth's great loves, yes, you guessed it - princesses and tea parties.

The party room:



As luck would have it, we had cleared out the sun room (which served as a play room) for our Christmas party, and never moved the toys back in, and the empty room just seemed to scream "princess tea party!"

Here's a closeup of the birthday banner:



Amanda has this awesome machine that would've made speedy work out of this project, and she generously offered to let me use it. I'll probably take her up on that next time, but I ended up doing this one by hand, cutting and gluing in front of the TV over the course of a few nights. It was kind of peaceful. I felt like I was really giving the right side of my brain a workout.

Activity: Make your own flower arrangements:


That is Elizabeth's Flower Market. I covered up the kids' blue & red play market with lime wrapping paper and scrap fabric from Elizabeth's old baby bedding. I can't sew, so I just kind of wrapped the canopy like a present and duck taped it like MacGyver. It looked awesome as long as you didn't look too closely. I lined up vases on one shelf and tumblers of pre-cut flowers on top. The kids made their own little arrangements to put on the tea party table. FACT: daisies, while lovely, grow in bunches more than single stems, and are therefore not the best choice for this activity when you are dealing with the under 10 set (since there may appear to be 6 blue daisies, but really only be one stem's worth of blue daisies, which will cause angst among your little partygoers). But as you can see, they worked it all out in the end:


Another activity: paint your own teacups:


I got the teacups from a local paint-your-own pottery place. The kids seemed to enjoy it for 10 minutes (I had been banking on 30, but who's counting?)

Ensembles:


I set out princess dresses in case anyone felt the need to fancy up a bit. I had planned to hang the dresses on a clothesline or something. But I was halfway through a 10 mile run with my training partners the day before the party and saw this princess coat rack in a store window. I couldn't resist (it's that theme thing again). I went back and got it later in the day.

And over in this corner, we had Princess Pedicures:




Really it was more manicures and face painting, but I loves me some alliteration.



I know what you're thinking: "Cathy, is that CURLZ????" Why yes, it is Curlz. For both the birthday banner and the pedicure sign, I downloaded traceable letters from this cool website. I couldn't resist going with Curlz for the pedi sign, but as I was cutting around all that curlziness at 1:00 a.m., I started to feel like I was just as crazy as the rebar lady.

Oh, the tissue paper pom poms! I saw them on a blog and decided that I had to make them:


I read and re-read the instructions for these things, but I kept getting lost at step 3. I emailed them to David at work and said "do you understand how this works?" He likened it to a Bob Ross drawing lesson on How to Paint a Tiger: "Draw a circle. Now draw a line. Okay, now finish your tiger." Anyway, once we started doing them, it all made sense. I don't know if I'll ever have another party without these pom pom balls - I loved them! Think twice before you ask me to co-hostess your party -- I'll probably try to force tissue paper pom pom balls on you.

An apothecary jar full of ring pops. Just 'cuz.



And balloons, because I was born without the gene that would allow me to let a birthday pass under my roof without balloons:



Here are the cupcakes and the tea party spread:



Elizabeth blowing out her candle:



The tea party:



Me with my birthday girl:



Elizabeth and Jacob (he was such a good sport about all this):



And Caroline. She's a mess. She was definitely in her element here:



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Elizabeth is joy personified, and has been from day 1 (well, maybe more like from day 43). She has a sweet heart and a loving and playful spirit. I will never be able to fully articulate my love for this child.



Happy birthday, my sweet Elizabeth!

First day of school

Jacob started second grade last week. As we stood on the front porch snapping the annual "first day of school picture," I was overwhelmed by this feeling that we were JUST HERE taking pictures on his first day of kindergarten. So this seems like as good a time as any to run through the photo progression:

KINDERGARTEN:


FIRST GRADE:


SECOND GRADE:


My baby's growing up. *sniff* So far he's always been excited to start school, so the first day of school is fun for all of us. Second grade is going really well - Jacob already had to apply for a class job. He decided not to run for mayor -- too much responsibility -- and applied for two positions, librarian and lunchroom helper. After a competitive interview process, he got the lunchroom helper job. Responsibilities include "making sure the class is following the rules" and "checking to see that our table is not a huge mess." David and I submitted references on Jacob's behalf, emphasizing his lifelong interest in following everybody's rules except ours, as well as his disdain for huge messes. We think he'll do a fantastic job. We're proud of our boy.

The blog lives!

Yup, we pretty much haven't done anything since Easter around here, so you haven't missed a thing. Okay, so there was a major surgery, the end of school, a trip to visit our friends in St. Louis over Memorial Day weekend (whatup Betsey & Tim?), the entire month of June, the 4th of July, Jacob's birthday, a trip to CT for Elizabeth and me for my sister's baby shower, and some other stuff. But none of that got blogged about, so there is no proof that any of it actually happened.


But we did go on vacation, by gosh, and I'm going to prove it! We went on our (mostly) annual family beach trip last week. The first time we went to the Seagrove, FL area was when we were expecting Jacob seven years ago, and David and I agreed that it was the best vacation we'd ever had. We've been fortunate enough to travel to lots of great places PK (pre-kids) - Europe, Hawaii, the Carribean, but never did we enjoy ourselves quite as much as we did that week when we just sat on our butts under an umbrella all week and read books. I guess it just never occurred to us to do that before. Once we had kids, the beach trip pretty much became the only kind of vacation that was feasible, and while all of the things that we loved so much about that first trip to Seagrove -- quiet, relaxation, books -- have gone by the wayside (in fact, on this latest trip, I did not even bother to bring a book, but did enjoy People (Robert Pattinson's complicated love life) and US (Jon Gosselin's complicated love life) when I locked myself in the bathroom), they've been replaced by a different kind of fun that comes with being seaside with little people.


We've stayed at the same place every year we've gone to Seagrove, save for the one year that we stayed at Rosemary Beach (affectionately known in these parts as "Pottery Barn Beach"). While we loved Rosemary Beach, and still like going there for ice cream in the evenings, we decided that for our current purposes it does not make sense to pay a premium to stay in a house with a Viking professional six-burner range (especially when that house is four blocks from the beach) given that the time spent getting our kids ready to go the beach exceeds our actual time on the beach approximately tenfold. So we stay in a perfectly adequate place with a normal oven (in bisque) that is right on the beach and has great views of the ocean





We had a great week for sure, but don't let all these happy pictures lull you into thinking that we didn't have to overcome adversity along the way. We did. For example, there were:

(1) Packing woes

I wanted to make some ice cream while we were down there, so I brought my ice cream maker on the trip. I also brought my immersion blender, but I left my panini press at home (and regretted it every. single. day.). I just felt like two small kitchen appliances would kind of fly under David's Packing Nazi radar, but three would set off alarms. I also packed up most of my pantry and refrigerator. A couple of hours into packing the car, it became apparent that the stuff wasn't going to fit, which caused (a very not happy) David to get out the car top carrier. As it turns out, our old carrier does not fit on our newer van, so we had to - horrors!- leave some stuff at home.

(2) The Deathly Fear of Sand and Water.

The dialogue with Caroline when we first checked in went something like this:

Cathy: LOOOOOOOK Caroline! It's the BEACH! Can you see the beach? And loooook! It's the OOOOCEAN! Do you like the ocean?
Caroline: No. No. No. No. No!!!!

I'm not sure if it was the beach or my über-annoying peppy voice that distressed her the most. In any event, she dug her nails into me as I brought her down to the beach (sometimes you just have to face fear head-on). But she was having none of it, so her time on the beach the first couple of days was brief. Fortunately, by Tuesday, she was tolerating the sand:


and by Thursday, she was digging the water (with her daddy):


(3) The Bloody Nose and the Ensuing Public Spectacle

We went out for a really fun dinner on Wednesday night. The kids were great at Mia Cocina, a new restaurant in Seacrest. Then we decided to walk to Rosemary Beach (of Viking appliance fame) for ice cream after dinner. It was pretty much clear from the outset that in the menace department, Caroline brought her A-game. She did not want to be held. She did not want to hold your hand. She wanted to run. She did not want to run on grass. She wanted to run on concrete. She did not want to run on concrete sidewalks. She wanted to run on concrete streets.

Caroline running to a harder, more heavily-trafficked surface:


You get the picture. There was a lot of picking Caroline up, wrestling with Caroline, redirecting Caroline, and generally trying to keep Caroline (and the other kids) safe. That was our humble goal for the evening.

So we got ice cream and sat on benches around a little green in Pottery Barn Beach while we ate our ice cream.

Elizabeth, enjoying her ice cream before "The Incident":



But there were lots of kids riding bikes on the green, so we decided to go across the street to another green that seemed less populated to let our kids run around. The rest of it sort of happened in slow motion. Caroline made a dash for the street. I lunged to catch her, and at the same time David dove to try to tackle her. I caught Caroline, and David somehow got tangled up with Elizabeth. The next thing I knew, Elizabeth was freaking out and her nose was bleeding profusely. I threw some wipes from my bag at Jacob and shouted at him to give them to David, and ran (with Caroline, the cause of all the mayhem) back to the Sugar Shak to get . . . napkins? Laffy Taffy? I don't know. When I got back to Elizabeth, a little crowd had formed, and a really sweet family had brought her a cup of ice and a roll of paper towels. Her nose stopped bleeding fairly quickly, but it took a long time to calm her down. And who really wants to have this conversation, on vacation or any other time?:

C: Her nose really doesn't look very swollen. Do you think?
D: Not very swollen.
C: Maybe a little. It definitely doesn't look crooked. Definitely not.
D: No, it doesn't look crooked.
C: If it were broken, it would look crooked, don't you think?
D: I would think there would be more swelling if she actually broke it.
C: Me too. {silence} Maybe it is a little swollen. Should we take her to a doctor?

In the end, we concluded that a visit to the doctor that evening was not necessary, as Elizabeth returned to her normal, happy self, and her nose did not really seem swollen (I mean, from most angles), and it definitely wasn't crooked. But that story is an excellent example of how our family slogan ("We stay in a lot") came to be.

Elizabeth, the night after The Incident (note the not-swollen, not-crooked nose):




(4) Poor Cell Phone Reception

Which made it difficult to talk with the pediatrician's office the next morning about "highly unlikely, but remotely possible" broken nose protocol.

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But in spite of these little obstacles, we had a really fun trip!








Before we went to the beach, I wanted to hook up with a photographer and get "beach pictures" done of the kids - you know, the pictures where you dress your family in white clothes and take them down to the beach right before sunset and pose them in front of the dunes? Yeah, those beach pictures. I LOVE beach pictures, and think that our kids are at a great age to do them. David likes beach pictures about as much as he likes beach houses with Viking appliances, but since he loves me, he was willing to suffer through them. For a variety of reasons, we decided not to do them this year. But I decided (unilaterally) to try to do some DIY beach pictures, even though I am no photographer. So I dressed my family in white clothes and made them trek out to the beach right before sunset (on two different nights!). While there would be no posing in front of the dunes (or anywhere else), this ended up being one of the best parts of the trip. The kids loved being on the beach at that hour, and we all had fun hunting crabs until the sun set. And I love some of the pictures, even though they were clearly taken by a hack photographer with a point & shoot:










I can't decide if the week went by really quickly or really slowly. A little of both. It was definitely not a relaxing vacation, but we'll get plenty of those soon enough.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend! To celebrate, here are some Easter pictures.

Anyone sick of looking at St. Patrick's Day pictures yet? I am! About a month ago, shortly after Easter, I uploaded a bunch of Easter pictures to this blog. And there they sat, in my draft folder, with no attempt by me to give the pictures context, share anecdotes of the events depicted, nada. So I was just about to declare blog post chapter 7 and get a fresh start with a new post, but then I decided, heck, I'll just post the pictures. Who needs cohesion, or a theme?

We spent Easter in Athens with David's parents and grandmother. Here's Caroline on Easter morning, hunting eggs at Grandmini's house. She doesn't give a damn about the eggs, she just likes carrying the bucket.


Jacob and Elizabeth, on the other hand, DO care about the eggs.



Jacob is distressed that Caroline has so few eggs and doesn't seem to care. He is giving her a motivational speech, a pep talk of sorts. He's not angry, he's just pointing (Jenny T, are you out there? I know you, I know you!)


Acting goofy.


Dressed up after Easter brunch, itching to get out of these clothes.


Caroline was SO not interested in standing with her brother and sister for pictures. Nor was she interested in smiling.


Jacob and Elizabeth, on the other hand, were strangely agreeable about the whole picture business.



Back to the morning Easter egg hunt. Grandmini, Grammy and Caroline, going back in to pick up that bucket.


Easter bunny came (we're working backwards here, apparently). Chocolate galore.


Caroline helped herself.


The day before - Easter egg hunt at the club. Jacob's bucket was overflowing with eggs. At one point, he walked over to a family and waited as they finished up their conversation. I did not know what they were talking about or why Jacob was standing there. As I started to walk over, I heard him offer his eggs to their little boy, who was upset that he didn't get enough eggs. Proud moment for mama.


And here is my boy a couple of days earlier, at our neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt, pre-haircut. (Big thanks to Mr. Clay, who actually gave the boy the first decent haircut he's EVER gotten!)


Elizabeth, once again taking the whole egg hunting business seriously.


Caroline, once again mystifying her siblings by not caring about egg quantity.


A rare picture of all three children standing together looking sorta happy.


Happy Elizabeth.


Poker face Caroline.



See you a month after the next major holiday!

Top 'o the morning to ya!

Sorry, I meant to post this closer to St. Paddy's Day, but I'm finding that life gets in the way of blogging from time to time. I've always loved St. Patrick's Day. I'm half Irish, and I went to a very Irish Catholic college -- my friends and I used to do a rendition of a typical class roll call: Collins, Connelly, Cullen, Murphy, O'Brien, O'Connell, O'Connor, O'Donnell, O'Dougherty, O'Hare, O'Keefe, O'Leary. Anyway, in keeping with my Irish roots and education, I love drinking and I hate snakes, so I can totally get behind any holiday that involves drinking green beer and thanking St. Patrick for driving the snakes out of Ireland. As with most holidays, though, St. Patrick's Day has gotten a bit more elaborate than it used to be. When I was a kid, we wore green and possibly ate a green bagel. That was it. When I was in college, we wore green and drank beer, but that didn't really distinguish it from any other day.

Well, starting last year, leprechauns started visiting my children's classrooms and, yes, causing trouble. Turning the toilet water green and such. We tried not to think much of it -- we figured "okay, so there are leprechauns now. Clearly they are "classroom leprechauns," not "house leprechauns," so we don't need to worry about them showing up at home and ransacking the place. The elves really create enough holiday-related mischief for one year, thankyouverymuch.

But then Jacob started lamenting the fact that St. Patrick's Day fell over spring break this year, and therefore he would not be there when the leprechaun came to his classroom. We tried to explain to him that vacation is really much better than some desk chairs getting turned upside down, and pointed out that if it's an ungodly mess that he's hoping to see, he could just look around his own house, and he wouldn't even have to wait until St. Patrick's Day.

But the leprechauns must have heard Jacob's pleas, because we were shocked to wake up on St. Patrick's Day and find this:


We are thinking they must be bigger than those little elves, because there is no way that the elves could have possibly turned that brown chair upside down. Presumably the leprechauns were far more wasted than the elves, however, so it is still a pretty impressive mess.

If I could direct you to the hearth, where Jacob is standing, you will see that the leprechauns left a old rusty planter pot of dollar store crap gold at the end of the two pieces of poster board hastily scotch taped together and colored after midnight in exceedingly juvenile manner rainbow!


The kids were delighted! The parents had a bigger mess than usual to clean up! Sound familiar? We're just hoping that the Easter Bunny will be too busy hiding eggs to be bothered with egging the house or whatever the next big thing in holiday-related mischief will be.