I made a very stupid mistake eight years ago when my oldest child was about four years old and had just attended his first children’s birthday party. He wanted a similar party for his own birthday. I said, “Those are expensive, and a lot of trouble. Maybe when you turn ten.” I forgot that I was talking to a child who, if he does not become a successful trial attorney and support us richly in our old age, will have to redeem himself in some other way that makes his legalistic, argumentative, “But didn’t YOU say…” personality worth it to have brought unharmed to adulthood. And so anyway when he turned ten he had a party at one of those places with a claw machine and skee ball and air hockey and so forth. Whew! THAT’S over with!

Sadly, I had forgotten the other four children.

Yes, yes, I realize I could say I had changed my mind or that it hadn’t worked out or that life wasn’t fair or WHATEVS, and I DO say such things quite often, but this is an idea the kids are soooooo excited about, and also I’d say nine-tenths of my reluctance is pure social anxiety (the other one-tenth is a mix of “dislike of other people’s children” and “OMG THE COST”), and also I think it’s nice for them to each get to have ONE big fun-location party per childhood, and also it gives me a fast answer every OTHER year (“No, only for the tenth birthday”), and so anyway I’m sticking to this, despite advising everyone I know to avoid making similar commitments because OMG I HATE THIS SO MUCH AND I HAVE TO DO IT FIVE TIMES.

Anyway. William’s ten-year party is coming up. We have booked one of those places where the site shows photos of children who look so unpleasantly out of control, I can’t IMAGINE any parent seeing the photos and then going on to book a party there. Nevertheless, we have done so.

The party may include up to fifteen children, including the Birthday Child. My first layer of agitation is the sending of invitations and the anticipated Total Lack of RSVPing. And they REALLY MUST RSVP (ideally via email), because the party costs the same if fewer than fifteen children come, and so BY GUM WE ARE HAVING FIFTEEN CHILDREN THERE, and so if some kids can’t come we need time to invite other children. So I’m all pre-agitated about THAT, because I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering an RSVP situation, but if not, you would not BELIEVE how few people RSVP. I mean, you’d think, “Well, of course a FEW inconsiderate ungracious ill-mannered wolf-raised PINEHOLES won’t RSVP, but even _I_ can make a few follow-up phone calls, no big!” And then when you are calling EVERY SINGLE PERSON you sent an invitation to, you will start to wonder why you didn’t just call them to invite them in the first place, since at least then it would have been a HAPPY phone call and you wouldn’t have had to deal with the fuss and expense of the paper invitations and stamps.

But what I’m working on NOW is party favors. And goodness, I could drop $50 on party favors and have fifteen frankly-pitiful favor bags. And I would like NOT to do either of the halves of that sentence. And yet I DO want favor bags, because I don’t know about other people’s kids, but those are my kids’ favorite parts of the parties they go to, which makes me wonder if we should just have a party where people arrive, eat cake, and collect bags. Maybe we could skip the cake. Maybe we could just mail them the bags.

Question one, then, is “What would be cool to put in a favor bag for fourth graders (a mix of boys and girls)?”

And question two is “Where should I buy the stuff, if my goals are ‘not spending $50’ and ‘not having to buy two 12-packs in order to get fifteen of something’?”

And if your answer is “Well, WE try to AVOID bringing a bunch of CHEAP CRAP into OUR house,” I would point out that this answers neither question one nor question two, and also that perhaps you’d like to work on that tone of voice so as not to be quite so off-putting.

I sent two photos of Elizabeth’s new magenta room to my friend this morning, and that reminded me I hadn’t done any photos here:

Right after painting (THREE COATS)

After we moved all her stuff back in

Next up is William and Henry’s room. I’m not sure if I’ve ever said why we have the rooms split up into pairs of one older boy and one younger boy—instead of the more intuitive arrangement of Two Older Boys and Two Younger Boys. It’s because Rob and William don’t get along. Huh. That took less time to explain than I’d expected.

So. Henry wants a blue and orange room, and William wants a blue and green room. They both want intense shades of these colors, and we are having such happy feelings about our orange bathroom and our magenta Elizabeth’s room, we’re going with that. For the blue: Behr Jamaican Sea, 510B-5. The orange: Behr Orange Spice 250B-5 (left over from our bathroom). The green: Behr Tart Apple 420B-4. Here’s a screen shot I took from Behr.com to show you what the colors look like together:

The original plan was to do three walls blue, then split the fourth wall horizontally with green on the top half and orange on the bottom half, so that each boy could have his bunk area in his own color choice. But now Paul is getting all interested in doing something crazier than that, so we’ll see.

I read a really good post recently (THANK YOU, Steph!) by a girl who wrote about what it’s like to be fat. I came away from that post thinking about how right she was: that shame as a motivational tool has already been maximized; that maybe we don’t know why some people are hungrier than others or store fat better than others or have less willpower/motivation than others—but that none of that matters when what we’re talking about is one group of people treating another group of people badly. Do you know what’s a worse character flaw than being fat? ANYTHING THAT IS A CHARACTER FLAW.

I came away from the article feeling understood, and like I had heard a voice of common sense rising over the “Everyone is skinny by default so you must be REALLY screwing up if you’re fat!” crowd. I also felt motivated to think things in a new way—to stop thinking all the time “Must! Lose! Weight!” and instead apply the “Something is better than nothing” principle I’m always trying to work on, and to do it in this way: “I may not be able to make my body smaller, but I can still eat broccoli to help prevent cancer. I may not be able to make my body smaller, but I can still exercise to improve my blood pressure and knee flexibility.”

Then I read part of the comments section. And it infected me like a virus: I feel nauseated, exhausted, feverish, like I need to stay in bed. Life looks grey; it’s hard to manage my usual routine.

Sometimes when people direct your attention to a comments section, it’s because they want you too to read it, so that you will agree with them and add your own comments for their side. In this case, I am telling you so that you will stay away from it: Warning! Pile of dangerous infectious biological material on the floor! Go around, go around!

The people in that comments section have a far worse problem than “ugly rolls of fat.” They have a part of them that’s hateful and ugly and disgusting and unhealthy, and it’s inside of them. A brief exposure to it has made me sick for days. It’s particularly appalling that they don’t know it’s rot: they think they’re perfectly healthy and normal, so they’re continually exposing others to it.

If you have been made ill by contact with people infected by this disease, I’m afraid treatment is very difficult. DO read the post I’m talking about, because it may soothe the pain of past contacts—but avoid re-exposure from the comments section. Think of them the way Paul told me to think of the underside of a lawnmower: as a pack of rabid weasels with knives.

Doesn’t this cover make the movie Cheri look like a delightful playful romp?

(image from Amazon.com)

Michelle Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates as aging courtesans! Rupert Friend as eye candy! “Immensely entertaining!” as a review bite! This movie is going to be FUN!

Ha ha haaaaaaaa.

What we have here is a movie more like Dangerous Liaisons (which Michelle Pfeiffer was also in): dark themes, French costumes, drug/sex/alcohol abuse, undereye circles, and unusually-persistent sexual obsession misrepresented as True Love. I don’t think Rupert Friend smiles a single time, and his hairstyle is unflattering, and he’s an unappealing mooch.

The two best and most believable characters in the whole thing are Frances Tomelty as Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer’s maid), and Felicity Jones as Rupert Friend’s wife. Not only does Felicity Jones do a very nice job Epitomizing Youth for contrast, but she also does a good job portraying a girl with deliberately suppressed spirit and intelligence. And Rose provides Sensible contrast that makes Michelle Pfeiffer look even sillier, plus she makes me wish very badly I had a maid who’d been with me for decades.

What I thought the movie was trying to say (and doing a good job saying, too) was “This is what happens if you mistake sexual persistence for love, and then one of you finds an actual love relationship.” But the ending makes it clear that we were supposed to see Perfect Love in the relationship made up of nothing more than flirty insult-humor, arch remarks, sexual attraction, and a mutual affinity for a decadent lifestyle. So then the ending is like “Here’s a bonus kick to the stomach for suffering through this whole thing.”

Okay! Based on your comments earlier today and also internet search results which let me access the thoughts and opinions of many, many, many people who don’t know what they’re talking about or how to express it in writing, I have made some Fish Tank Revisions.

1. I released the pregnant-or-maybe-just-plus-sized platy from the fish nursery, and removed the fish nursery from the tank.

2. I added three more fake plants: two of the regular sorts of plants, plus one roughly 5×5-inch square of low dense foliage I thought would be good for babies to hide in.

Here’s the new-look tank:

The dense baby-hiding foliage is front left. The two regular sorts of plants blend in, but one is reddish-brown and the other is green and lacy.

To the best of my internet-search-acquired knowledge, two of the four female platys are pregnant, and in fact are to the “can see the babies’ eyeballs through their mother’s skin” (oh, GROSS, but you DID ask) stage of pregnancy. But between them they ought to have more than enough babies to satisfy Darwin, now that I have all the new fake plants for hiding.

********

If you enjoy discussing the at-home mom / working mom Balance thing so many of us struggle with, but without all the petty sniping and bitching and “anecdotes designed to make everyone attack one side or the other as if they were piranhas with a steak,” we’re having a good talk about it over at Milk and Cookies, and I hope you’ll join us unless you’re one of those people who tries to make other people feel bad about their choices / life circumstances, in which case we decline the pleasure of your company but thanks anyway.

Were you waiting for a fish update? THEN YOU ARE IN LUCK.

Especially because I can’t remember where I left off. Let’s see: we have a 14-gallon tank and it had two rosy-red minnows (“look just like goldfish but don’t grow as big”) in it, and then we bought five twin-bar platys (“yellow fish with black tail stripes”), and one was a little sickly from the beginning (bitten-looking tail, clamped fins, keeping to the top or else the bottom, not swimming with the others) and eventually died. We bought three more platys, all female because we read that it’s best to have 1 male to 3 females or else the males can chase the females to literal death, which made me hate men for a moment. Then one of the new platys died, too. So now we have six platys, four females and two males, which is not perfect but it seems like it’s working okay.

We’d thought the minnows would enjoy the company and stop hiding so much, but instead they hid even more than before. So we moved them back to the 2.5-gallon coldwater tank, and we bought three long-finned zebra danios (“stripey grey fish”) for the 14-gallon tank. One of the danios died. Fish are tricky business.

So. We have six platys and two danios in a 14-gallon tank, and two rosy red minnows in a 2.5-gallon tank.

Actually, the “six platys” count is not accurate, because one of the platys had babies awhile back, and we’ve seen up to three baby platys at a time, but we’re not sure we still have three because for awhile we’ve seen only one at a time. I tried to catch the babies with a net, but I was unsuccessful: they are SO TINY, and so good at hiding.

Baby platy, tiny, in front of T-Rex decoration.
Compare to gravel for scale.

We also bought a little “fish nursery”: a small box made of plastic sticks and netting, which fits inside the main tank. I got it because one of the platys looks pretty clearly pregnant, and what you’re supposed to do is put the platy in the sub-tank, then after her babies are born take HER out, and then the babies are safe in the sub-tank. But it’s been, like, 2 weeks, and a platy pregnancy is only 4 weeks, so I’m starting to feel like this is going to end that she’s not pregnant at all but just a little plump (and pissed with us for rushing her to the maternity ward when she’d just had an extra fish flake or two), so we’ll see.

This morning I thought I would have green tea instead of coffee. AHA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!! Coffee has been brewed, and I’ve had some.

********

This is the last day to enter the worst Valentine’s Day gift contest. (Don’t worry: the winner isn’t chosen by who has the worst story. It’s random selection.) I encourage you to enter, not only because there is a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate on the line and because it makes me look good to my boss if there are lots of comments on a post, but also because I am SO ENJOYING reading the stories. Some of them are so appalling, but in the “slap your hand across your mouth” kind of way, rather than the “heart sinking in dismay” way.

********

Elizabeth has chosen the color for her new room. After a week of dithering between “aqua” and “aqua with pink corners” and “pink with aqua corners” and so forth, she was getting ready for school one morning and said, “I’ve decided, and it’s my final decision: magenta.” I borrowed one of her magenta gloves, drove to Home Depot, found one single color that met that standard, and bought it.

Paul has done two coats of it and is going to finish the third coat of it tonight. It is just as startling a color as you would imagine. Very pretty, too! But if we ever want to paint over it, I’m predicting eight coats of Kilz. Here’s a screen shot from Behr.com, and keep in mind that not only is her room not that large (I think it’s 11×9), nor as high-ceilinged, nor as sparsely/whitely furnished, nor as well-lit, but also we have medium-dark wood trim instead of white:

Exotic Bloom

This color makes the “bright lilac” we used in the office look like a pale model-home lilac in comparison.

The Milk Divinity looked yummy, and I’d say it was “nice”: light sweet nougat-like filling with nuts in it, covered in chocolate. I don’t think I’d order it again: it was so mild, it barely made an impression.

Milk Divinity
(image from Sees.com)

I was certain I’d like the Maple Walnut because that’s usually one of my top favorites in any assortment box. It’s coated in dark chocolate. I think I’d like it with milk chocolate, too, but the dark is perfect. MMM YUM. Mapley without being over-mapley, and some nuts, and definitely in my upper tier.

Maple Walnut
(image from Sees.com)

I thought I was very likely to like the Caramel, and I did. Very nice caramel (not too sticky, not too hard on the teeth) with almonds, coated in milk chocolate. Seems like it should be called Milk Almond Caramel instead of just Caramel. Upper middle tier.

Caramel
(image from Sees.com)

I knew the Light Chocolate Truffle was unlikely to be a success: I always give Paul the truffles from an assortment. But this one was milk chocolate and had ground almonds on top so I thought maybe? But no. This is not the fault of the truffle, but rather that I don’t tend to like chocolate-covered chocolate truffles. Lower tier for me, and I gave the other half of it to Paul.

Light Chocolate Truffle
(image from Sees.com)

The Milk Butterchew is a nice caramel. It’s very much like the Caramel, above, except without nuts. It says it’s a “brown sugar” caramel, which is why I chose it, but it tasted like regular caramel to me. I wouldn’t specifically order them: they’re yummy, and I’d enjoy them in an assortment, but they’re not special to me—I’d much rather have the one with nuts, above. Middle tier.

Milk Butterchew
(image from Sees.com)

I mentioned the Milk Bordeaux in my first post on this topic. I’m glad I also got a Dark Bordeaux, because as with some other very-sweet fillings (like vanilla buttercream), I preferred it with the dark chocolate coating. I still didn’t like the texture of the sprinkles.

Dark Bordeaux
(image from Sees.com)

I was pretty sure I’d like the Walnut Roll enough to want a piece but not enough to get a whole bunch, and that was exactly my opinion of it. The inside is like a cross between a buttercream and a caramel: neither creamy nor chewy, but more like a nougat. Then rolled in walnuts. Yummy, a nice large satisfying piece, and a nice break from chocolate. Middle tier for me.

Walnut Roll
(image from Sees.com)

One of the reasons I got so! excited! about this See’s order is that I chose one or two pieces each of a bunch of kinds that were pretty adventurous considering the price per pound. If I’m just considering a box of regular chocolates, I keep converting it into “bags of peanut M&Ms I could have for the same price.” But if I’m SAMPLING ODD FLAVORS—well! That’s valuable scientific experimentation right there!

I was very curious about the Almond Truffle, in part because I think it LOOKS so yummy. One of the reasons I don’t usually choose truffles is that I don’t like how they’re so dense and rich AND covered in chocolate: it’s like taking a piece of fudge and dipping it in chocolate (okay, that sounds a little good). The Almond Truffle is like a piece of fudge rolled in crushed almonds. Upper tier for me.

Almond Truffle
(image from Sees.com)

I chose the Walnut Square mostly because it was so neat-looking: why only dipped on the bottom half? And it’s a very satisfying piece to pick out of the box and hold: heavy and largish. The caramel has a noticeable butter flavor and is a nice “chewy but I won’t have to keep prying it off my teeth” consistency, and I like the nuts in it. I’d want one of these in an assortment (for beauty as well as for variety), but I don’t think I’d specifically order it again: I would prefer it with more chocolate, I think.

Walnut Square
(image from Sees.com)

The Scotchmallow intrigued me: “Honey marshmallow” and caramel. I can’t tell you if I liked it or not. The contrast of very-thick caramel and very-light-and-fluffy marshmallow (I didn’t notice any honey flavor, but I also forgot I meant to take a nibble of it separately to check) was odd, and I didn’t like the way the chocolate was breaking off with each bite. But…I think I like it anyway, and it’s definitely distinctive in an “I wouldn’t/couldn’t make this myself” kind of way. I would put it in the middle tier so far, with more testing required while I get used to the oddness.

Scotchmallow
(image from Sees.com)

In my top three favorites from a box of Russell Stover chocolates is the Roman Nougat. I would buy a whole box of just those. (And in fact, in looking on their website to make sure I got the name right, I found that I CAN buy a whole box of just those, as soon as they’re back in stock. This is a happy, happy day.) ANYWAY, when I saw See’s Rum Nougat, it looked very similar to the Roman Nougat and I wondered if it WAS similar. And it IS! The See’s version has a more intense rum flavor, and it has raisins as well as cherries and walnuts. I lovvvvvve it, but it’s one of those WEIRDISH candies where if someone else said “AAAAAAAAAAAA how can you EAT those, I SPIT THEM OUT patooie-patooie!!” I would said, “Dude, I TOTALLY see what you mean, and also can I pick them out of your assortment box?”

Rum Nougat
(image from Sees.com)

I don’t usually like coffee-flavored things unless they are coffee, but the Kona Mocha looked so yummy I tried it anyway. But I was right: I don’t really like coffee-flavored things. I would like a variation with chocolate buttercream covered in white chocolate and toasted coconut but without the coffee flavor. Still, really fun to try.

Kona Mocha
(image from Sees.com)

I ordered the Pineapple Truffle out of astonishment: PINEAPPLE? with CHOCOLATE? But I really liked it: intense pineapple flavor, with teensy barely-noticeable bitlits of pineapple in the filling. Upper tier for me: A+++ would order again. Not a whole box, but definitely would get some in any custom mix.

Pineapple Truffle
(image from Sees.com)

The Divinity Puff looked a little WHITE: divinity, white chocolate, walnuts, coconut. I wanted to try it because I wasn’t sure I’d like it but I thought I MIGHT. And it is kind of yummy! I’d put it in my middle tier, maybe lower-middle. I’d want one in an assortment but probably wouldn’t specifically order it.

Divinity Puff
(image from Sees.com)

A Mayfair is like if you liked the taste of chocolate-covered cherries (which I do), but you didn’t like the way they sploosh if you don’t bite into them carefully (indeed I don’t), and so you chopped the cherries and filling into a buttercream instead and then added walnuts. YUM. Upper tier for me.

Mayfair
(image from Sees.com)

Oh, man, what a bad night’s sleep. It wasn’t up there with, for example, the night in the hospital after one of my c-sections, when I spent all night feeding one twin while the other one cried, then switching so the crying one was being fed and the fed one was crying, until 4:00 a.m. when the nurse took them to the nursery, and then she brought them back at 4:20 a.m. and I am not even kidding, saying they were hungry, so that I watched incredulously as the sun came up and I STILL hadn’t slept after SURGERY 24 HOURS EARLIER.

But as we know, an experience does not have to be The Worst Anyone Has Ever Experienced in order to qualify as Bad, and last night was still Bad. Elizabeth joined us around 11:00, and Henry joined us at 2:00. I’d gone back to sleep after Elizabeth, despite the way she kept flipping over so that first her hair was in my face and then she turned over and started kicking me and then back to the hair in my face, but Henry talked for awhile about avian dinosaurs, and once he’d gone to sleep I lay awake fretting about assorted financial stuff, my parents’ eventual decrepitude, Paul’s mother’s estate (WHEN will it be settled, WHEN?), my overdue GYN check-up, and the time my landlord wouldn’t refund my security deposit OR a month’s rent I’d paid in advance, with him saying I’d left tons of boxes in the apartment all month (I HAD NOT) and adding that if I wanted money I should “get a job” (I HAD ONE) (also: MY EMPLOYMENT OR LACK THEREOF HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT).

Around 3:45 I felt too claustrophobic to lie there even ONE MORE MINUTE: we have my side of the bed directly against a wall while we rearrange the house, and so I was trapped between the wall and a bed crammed full of snoring people, and I had to get OUT OUT OUT AAAAAAAAAA. I couldn’t find my blanket in the dark closet, and both throws are on our bed but in between other blankets so not easily extracted, so I put on Paul’s wool coat and lay down in a recliner. The coat was itchy but warm, and a cat came and hopped up on me, and I had jusssst drifted off to sleep when the clock chimed six. And I thought, “It can’t be six o’clock. I can keep sleeping. I KNOW it’s not six, because it was 3:45 less than fifteen minutes ago.” But then I started thinking, “What if it REALLY IS six o’clock? Then Paul will be late for work, and Rob will miss the bus and I’ll have to drop him off at school and it will cheese up our whole morning.” So I had to get up and check, and no, it was four o’clock and the children had been playing with the clock.

I settled back into the recliner and thought for awhile about the time in high school when a friend of mine heard a rumor that I’d slept with my boyfriend and she confronted me about it, and her attitude was that if I HAD done so, then I was absolutely required to have divulged that to her, and that she had every right to feel I’d violated our friendship, and that it didn’t really matter if I denied it because the rumor-spreader had no reason to lie. When MY points were (1) I HADN’T, but (2) if I HAD, I would have had the perfect right to keep that sort of thing private, and (3) the whole “girlfriends before boyfriends” thing did not mean my relationship with her was in fact closer than my relationship with my boyfriend OR that I had to tell her everything about my relationship with him, and (4) where’s the whole “girlfriends before rumor-spreaders” part? Then I dozed off and dreamed that Rob had left the freezer door open and everything had thawed out and had to be thrown away, including two cartons of Breyer’s ice cream, and when I was speaking to him about it he was defending himself and rolling his eyes and blaming other people and making the kind of insult-humor backtalk we’re currently training him to see is not the same as “just joking,” and in short behaved pretty much exactly how he would have in real life, except that in the dream I started trying to HIT him, and my arms were too weak and it was very frustrating.

Then the STUPID CLOCK chimed the quarter-hour and it was 4:15 and I was awake again. And I needed to pee. I got up and peed, and returned to the chair, and was just drifting off when I heard a cat making a “covering” sound behind my chair. I didn’t get up to investigate, but instead listened so hard I woke myself up entirely and started mentally composing a post about how St. Valentine’s Day is not in fact a Hallmark holiday and it’s very tiresome to keep hearing it called that in scornful tones year after year by person after person, and then I fell asleep and dreamed I was trying to load the dishwasher but the cups wouldn’t stay upside down. And then a cat went skittering across the hardwood in pursuit of another cat skittering across the hardwood, and it was 4:30.

So then I sat in the recliner thinking about how nothing I ever try to do ever works: not weight loss, not exercise programs, not psychological improvement programs, not “trying to be a person who likes social stuff,” not stopping pulling my eyelashes out, not keeping the house clean, NOTHING. It took me until 5:00 to remember that other things HAVE worked: maintaining a blog, having children, investing in the stock market, paying off our student loans years early. I fell asleep and woke up at 5:18 when Paul got up for work. I lay there feeling very sorry for myself and needing to pee, until I got up at 5:45 to take my own shower.

But have I mentioned our old water heater broke and we replaced it with a new one with a feature that lets it heat the water much hotter while still preventing scalding by mixing it with cool as it leaves the heater? This increases the hot water supply without increasing the tank size. Which means that I had a HOT SHOWER.

Also I still have a lot of See’s chocolates to taste and to report on.

Also the house-rearranging is going very well, so that I am now writing in a bright lilac room.