I used to be very political. Now I am just kind of resigned...a loyal Democrat, of course, but let's just say I'm not occupying anything. In fact:
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 insomnia inspiration, I decided to make my own invitations. I tried to download some circus fonts, but--I am not making this up--they only had periods and commas for punctuation. I needed the colon for the time, so that would not work. Then I found and downloaded (for free!) the world's totally cutest font:
http://www.fontspace.com/search/?q=elefont
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.
Yes, I really want to hate Macy's. They took over Marshall Field's, Bon Marche, Meier & Frank, the list goes on. And yet...they really do have Christmas dialed in.
I took C and J to the Macy's Christmas parade on Friday. At almost 11, C may be aging out of this sort of thing, but J was in the sweet spot. In many ways, this parade is way better than the Rose Parade. (Blasphemy, I know, but really, does anyone want to see all those boring sister-city marchers? There's a reason they all walk at the tail end of the Rose Parade. I'm just saying.) The Macy's one had real PPS high school marching bands--not just suburban ones--and even some really bad but totally cute middle-school bands, all playing Christmas carols, not Sousa marches. They were interspersed at delightfully short intervals by holiday-themed inflatables and costumed marchers. Not a sister city in sight, and a much better ratio of floats to bands than the Rose Parade. The only sour note was the costumed Frango Mint people. (I'm not sure if they have brought them back, but they fired all the candy workers in Chicago when Macy's took over Marshall Field's. Or something like that; my mother still holds a grudge, so I do--filial loyalty, I guess.) Anyway. The parade lasted only about 45 minutes, and was refreshingly small-town-ish. They even threw candy at us (yes, I ate their Frangos) and even--this was odd--a Nutcracker luggage tag. Huh?
Oh! And llamas! Nothing says Christmas like a llama. The same ones, I should note, that appear in the Rose Parade. Only here they wore Christmas blankets instead of flowers. Sorry, they still freak me out.
But the best part of the day was SantaLand. We waited until about 7 PM and no one was in line in front of us. J grew shy on Santa's lap, so I prompted her: Fire truck! Clothes for Pink Baby! A stroller! I had told C I would give her $5 if she asked Santa for a 5-way bra. She did, but she laughed hysterically the whole way through. Santa looked at me and asked if she just said what he thought she had. Um, yeah. Inside joke, Claus, move on.
A few years ago, Macy's restored the monorail, which I assume, since I didn't grow up here, used to actually run around Meier & Frank. Now it just sits there, but J loved climbing on it. They have a stable with eight stalls, each painted with a reindeer's name and with that reindeer inside. Rudolph is outside the stable, and his head kind of bucks around near an elf and a candy cane, or something. It wasn't quite clear to me what was going on there. J, however, was transfixed. She is in full-believer mode, puzzling how Santa will get into our house since we don't have a fireplace but also scared witless that he might actually go upstairs to her room. And, you know, look at her, or something.
I know that's not what Christmas is supposed to be about. But can you teach a three-year-old the meaning of Christmas, even if you're not at all religious? I think so, if you boil it down to peace, joy and love, which is pretty much what it does boil down to. She is my peace, my joy and my love, and I hope that one day she brings all that peace, joy and love to the rest of the world.
Only 25 more days!
I am so tired. Astoria, Chicago, Portland, Atlanta--so far this week I have spent at least one night in each city, and tomorrow night I'll sleep in Seattle.
Why? Well, let's start with the lack of comparable-paying jobs where I live, and let's finish with where else would I get 8 weeks of paid vacation and full pay and benefits for my whole medical leave last winter? And in between, let's think about the great health insurance and the pension, and the fact that, for the most part, I actually like what I do.
Emphasis on "for the most part."
"Road warrior" is not the right phrase. "Road tolerator" is a hell of lot more apt, if linguistically challenged. I Skype with J nightly and miss her like I would miss breathing. I just try to get the work done and get back home to her.
I saw a woman today (another lawyer) whom I had not seen since before I was diagnosed last year. I like her, though we are technically opponents, and could see being friends with her under different circumstances. It was good to see her because I have been feeling the need to get my "old normal" back, and she's part of that. Life goes on, and the good things and the good people stay the same.
For the most part.
One has to start somewhere.
Do I begin with, "I was born on a dark and stormy night"? I have no idea if it was stormy, though I suppose it was dark since it was almost midnight, and it was October, and it was in Chicago.
Or do I start with my first day of school? Lincoln Park Cooperative Nursery School, if you were wondering.
Do I start when I finished school? Graduation from University of Oregon School of Law--again, if you were wondering.
Do I start with meeting my husband? It was my birthday, but neither dark nor stormy.
Do I start with the birth of my daughter? A cold, wet day on the Oregon Coast, yet the sunniest day of my life.
Do I start a when she was a toddler, and I learned I had breast cancer?
Or do I just start here? Welcome.
