That pretty much sums up how I feel these days. I am more interested in J's first real birthday party than I am in the results of today's primaries.
Oh, wait, did I mention J's birthday party? Why, let me tell you about it! I should say upfront that I am not one of the Craft People. I am not an event planner. I have never thrown a kid's birthday party before. I just have sort of a lot of downtime with my laptop in hotel rooms. And I am cheap. You have been warned.
So J wanted a Dumbo party. It may surprise you, as it did me, to know that NO ONE makes Dumbo party supplies. Well, technically, you can order them on E-Bay from the UK, but they're not cheap and they're geared toward baby showers and first birthdays. I managed to talk her down from Dumbo to an ordinary circus party. And no, she has never been to the circus, and yes, I am morally opposed to circuses. (Insert righteous indignation here.) I have to credit G with the idea of holding it in a yurt at a nearby state park. Yurts are tents, circuses are in tents, stay with me, people! And it costs only $42 to rent a yurt on a cold wet weekend in March. So we got a couple. It's not a sleepover, but a few of our family friends with kids J's age rented them too, so we can throughly enjoy the pony keg of Fort George Vortex that G reserved for the occasion, without having to drive home afterwards.
I ordered circus-themed plates and napkins from Party City.
Classy, I know! In a moment of
Still no real punctuation, but I had to have it. And that was the end of my creativity. I did not know you could just buy blank cards at the craft store. Maybe because I've been in a craft store like, twice in my life. I bought some, but I could not figure out how to print the invitations onto the cards. So I let J pick some 8.5x11 paper (pink and purple, of course) and just ran them through my printer. Again, classy. And, yeah, I maybe sort of mentioned the Vortex in the invitation. I do want people to come, after all.
And that's it. The party is next Saturday, and I will be home for a grand total of 2 non-consecutive days between now and then. Here is my tentative party plan:
Play with toys
Play some games (freeze dance?)
Maybe have a parade around the campground
Eat hot dogs
Eat cake
Presents
Vortex
Half-assed is my middle name. The best part is, J won't remember any of it, until some therapist drags it our of the recesses of her memory when J's having her mid-life crisis. Or I will just put the following pictures in her baby book and totally fuck with her memory. Because this party sure as hell isn't going to look anything like this:
Or this:
Seriously, do these kids' parents not have jobs? Well, actually, probably not.
But there will be goody bags. I had no idea of the amount of controversy you can find on the internet concerning goody bags. Either they're obligatory and you must be very clever and make your own crafty-and-kicky-but-clearly-expensive goody bags:
Or you must have NO goody bags at all. Because they send the wrong message, and encourage greed and consumption of plastic Chinese-made crap, and probably children who receive them will grow up to be Republicans. (Insert righteous indignation here.) When you do a Google image search for "goody bags send wrong message," you get this:
and this:
(Yes, I can see why they have a patent on their search algorithm.)
But when I was a kid, my favorite part of a birthday party was the goody bag, which we called a loot bag. My feelings were pretty much like this:
So I took the middle route: paper bags with a lolly and a coloring book. If I am feeling snappy, I may take my Sharpie and add the kids' names!
It's going to be a wild ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment