I finally watched Pitch Perfect, just before Pitch Perfect 2 came out.

(image from Amazon.com)

In fact, I watched it twice. Which surprised me, because the first time through I was thinking it was pretty lame/silly. There’s a part where one of the characters says she doesn’t like movies because they’re so predictable, and I was thinking, “TELL ME ABOUT IT.”

And it IS predictable. And a lot of the characters are caricatures, with simplified motivations and feelings and personalities (here’s The Weird One, here’s The Sexy One, etc.), and there are some really dumb parts (“Why won’t you let anyone GET CLOSE TO YOU??,” “Why won’t you let me FOLLOW MY DREAMS, Uncool Parent??,” etc.). And there is some exaggerated gross-out stuff that is not my style at all.

But the real point of the plot seems to be to hold together a bunch of really good/fun a cappella numbers, and it does that job very well. And everyone in the movie is really, really pleasant to look at, which helps too, and there are some good jokes and good lines and good scenes, and I LOVED the songs/performances, and the fact of the matter is that not only did I watch it twice, I’ll almost certainly watch it more times than that. And even though I found it completely predictable, at one point William, age 14, said, “Ug, I know EXACTLY what’s going to happen here,” and I said, “Oh, I know”—and then later he said, “That wasn’t at ALL what I thought was going to happen,” so it may be perfect for young-adult viewers (if you don’t mind them seeing a little crude/racy stuff, which I don’t).

One good thing about the movie is that you can pick up anywhere or leave off anywhere and still enjoy it; I made fudge and had to keep leaving the room and/or looking away from the screen, and that didn’t matter at all. A downside is that the soundtrack is reportedly disappointing: just fragments of songs, and leaves out a lot of the best ones. I had it in my cart to buy on the spot, and then read the reviews and backed off.

I read Find Me, which I thought would be exactly my thing, but it wasn’t:

(image from Amazon.com)

The inside flap describes a girl who doesn’t catch a devastating and hugely contagious illness; she and other non-sick people are taken to a hospital so their immunity can be studied and maybe used for a cure. The subplot is that she’s looking for her mother, who left her on the steps of a hospital when she was an infant.

The book has several really engaging mysteries in it—and then it just chooses not to solve them. I consider that a big cheat: a good hook is only legitimate if a good reveal is coming. Oh, is that not how it works in real life, where we often don’t get to know why something happened or how something turned out? THAT IS WHY I AM READING FICTION. It is so wrong to have a reader follow a narrator right up to the BRINK of the resolution of a plotline, and then have the author be all, “Yeah, but it sounds prettier/deeper if I end philosophically/poetically rather than descriptively/satisfyingly. And by the way, I’m never going to tell you what happened with plotlines A, B, and C, either.”

I notice that the author previously wrote short-story collections, and this is her first novel. I remember reading another author, one who wrote both short stories and novels (I think it was Jeffery Deaver), say he enjoyed writing short stories because there isn’t the same contract with the reader: with a novel, you have to have satisfying resolution, you can’t kill your protagonist, etc., but with a short story you have more freedom to end things without resolution or with disaster or a sudden surprise twist. It seems to me that Laura van den Berg wrote a novel using the short-story reader contract.

I had such a good salad for dinner tonight. Several of you mentioned a cheeseburger salad on the salad toppings post, and I hadn’t yet gotten around to clicking the link before Paul said he was going to grill burgers. I asked for mine without a bun, and asked for ten minutes’ warning to assemble the rest of the salad. I put the rest of the big bag of mixed spring greens into the bowl, and filled in the gaps with iceberg lettuce (I hadn’t realized the bag of spring greens was so low). I added a handful of grape tomatoes cut into quarters or sixths (some of them are biiiiig grapes). Then some shredded cheddar. Then, today I’d bought some bacon bits, so I added those too: BACON cheeseburger salad! Then the burger was done, and Paul cut it into a lot of little pieces (he asked how small I wanted it cut, and I said I wanted, like, 40 pieces). I put that on top of everything else.

I wondered what to do about dressing, and decided on mustard and ketchup, even though Paul acted grossed out by that. I didn’t use very much of either one, and I mixed everything together, so there was no visible ketchup/mustard anywhere—just a suggestion of the taste. (It made me remember a vegetarian co-worker of mine who said he would sometimes eat a toasted hot dog bun with ketchup and mustard and relish on it, because that was what he was REALLY craving when he felt like he was craving a hot dog.) I think if I’d thought about it more beforehand, I might have whisked together mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard to make a dressing. [Note: I did this on future salads and it was exactly delish.] Ooo, and maybe some dill pickle relish!

It was very, very good, and took a lot longer to eat than a cheeseburger. I didn’t really notice the bacon, so I’d probably skip that next time (though maybe when I take it out I’ll notice the salad isn’t as good). I’d add more cheese instead: I’m not sure how much I put in, but it wasn’t enough.

If I’d thought of it in time, I might have broiled a hamburger bun to make croutons. Instead, I put on a handful of crushed Doritos, and that was SO GOOD.

I’m finding that one downside of eating salad is that everyone, everyone, everyone associates it with weight-loss attempts. So when I put cheese and Doritos on my salad, I feel as if Paul is giving me the side-eye (even though he says nothing, does nothing with his eyes, and this could be all in my imagination)—as if I’m trying to self-righteously pretend I’m Eating Light when actually I’m eating many calories of cheese and bacon and chip. It feels hard to explain that what I’m actually doing is turning a cheeseburger with a side of Doritos into a big heaping helping of greens and tomatoes, plus the burger and Doritos, plus the joy of eating MORE.

[Follow-up: The next week, I added a cut-up dill pickle. SO GOOD.]

One thing I do like about eating more vegetables is it means more eating. I realize this is not a new and startling concept, and yet it surprises me afresh each time. Like, here is two scrambled eggs:

And here is two scrambled eggs with broccoli, red bell pepper, and corn (and some hot sauce and a little cheddar cheese):

That is a much bigger breakfast! I LIKE bigger meals!

I am so happy that MomQueenBee recommended Ziploc steam bags, because I am using them CONSTANTLY. Or rather, I am using ONE, over and over, and I’m happy she mentioned this could be done because I never would have paid $2-something for a box of 10 otherwise. I fill it to the halfway mark with frozen broccoli and frozen corn, put it in the microwave for 4 minutes (the instructions say 3, but our microwave is a little underpowered), and work on getting the pan and eggs and plate and cheese and sriracha sauce ready. After I add the vegetables to the pan, I give the bag a quick rinse and put it upside down to dry for the next day. I’ve done this at least 10 times so far; the zipper is getting a little warped but still works.

Incidentally, at FIRST I thought the bag experiment was a failure, because I looked down the little list of “how long to cook which things,” and I came to broccoli and it said 1.5 minutes, so that’s what I did. I didn’t read the rest of the list. If I HAD read the rest of the list, I would have come to “all frozen vegetables, 3 minutes” at the bottom of the list. It seems like the more general instruction should be HIGHER UP on the list.

I have this song going through my head:

Bebe Rexha “I’m Gonna Show You Crazy.” If you want only the song, you can skip the first minute, which is story set-up for the song. I will note there is a lot of swearing in the song, in case you have kids milling around you.

I found the song because I looked up Hey Mama, hoping I could justify enjoying the bizarre catchiness of the appalling lyrics by seeing it was sung satirically by, say, a grown-up version of the robot Vicki from Small Wonder. Close: it’s sung by a holographic Nicki Minaj, who makes me want light pink hair. I looked in the comments to make sure we all agreed the lyrics were appalling but catchy, and I found a lot of people talking about how unfair it was that Nicki Minaj was getting credit for Bebe Rexha’s singing. (Nicki Minaj does the rapping, and BeBe Rexha sings the chorus—but I don’t see Bebe Rexha in the video.)

So then I searched Bebe Rexha, found I’m Gonna Show You Crazy, and now I go around humming “I’m gonna show you LOco MAniac, SICK bi_ch, psychopath!,” even though I’m about as likely to show you any of those things as I am to find it fresh and new to think craziness is accurately and freshly represented by youth, super-sexy clothes, and artistic talent.

Do you know, it is very hard to complain about asking for advice and getting The Wrong Kind, for free, and with no real negative consequences—but I’m going to do it anyway. [Swistle from the Future sez: “This sentence is ridiculous. What refers to what here? Is it hard to complain for free and with no negative consequences? Because that’s how the sentence reads.” Swistle from the Past: “Meh. I don’t see an easy fix. They’ll figure it out.”]

Here is what happened. My town has a Facebook page for residents. I need to buy three particular related items, and I need them for tomorrow, so I asked on the local Facebook page if anyone had seen any of the items in a local store and specified that I needed to buy them today; I mentioned the one local store where I’d already looked. Of the twelve answers:

• Five suggested I look online
• Four made guesses of stores where they hadn’t seen the items
• One suggested a store two hours away that “might” have them
• One told me the manufacturer of the items
• One suggested the specific store I had specifically mentioned in my question
• One speculated the items would be hard to find
• Three, and three only, mentioned stores where they had seen one or more of the items

(Those don’t add up to twelve, because some comments did several things.) Out of twelve answers, THREE answered the question I asked. (Though I went to the store two of them mentioned, and the store no longer has the items. And the other mentioned a store 40 minutes away that has only one of the three items. But I’m counting all of those as successful answers, because they answered what I’d asked.)

It’s not like it ruined my life or anything: clearly I can just IGNORE the useless answers, at no real personal cost. And I’m certain I’ve accidentally “answered” questions in this way MYSELF, because I have CAUGHT MYSELF DOING IT—and who KNOWS how many times I DIDN’T catch it. But it’s exasperating to ask a question and get non-answers to it—and not an INTERESTING question, where even discussion that didn’t answer the question per se would still be interesting, but just a specific, factual, boring, “What retail establishment carries this product?” question. It makes me feel as if I have to be super-super insultingly specific before I ask. Like, “I need these three items, and I need them today and I don’t want to pay whatever it would cost to have an online place ship them to me by tomorrow morning, so I am looking for a local store that has them. This store should be within reasonable driving distance, which I’d define as ‘half an hour away.’ I would like to know if you have, with your own eyes, seen these actual items I am asking about, in a store that meets the qualifications I just mentioned. WITH YOUR OWN EYES. I’m not asking you to research this for me, or to make a list of Stores That Exist In Our Town, or to give me more information about the products I’m looking for, or to discuss the products in general; I ONLY want to know if you have ALREADY found them.”

So there is my Small Complaint About Something Small for today.

On to salads! I tried another really good one. I based it loosely on the Spicy Chicken Caesar Salad that Paul had at Wendy’s the other day. Very, very loosely—like, just used the “spicy chicken” and “Caesar” words.

I started again with a lot of mixed spring greens. I added some shredded cheddar because I didn’t have whatever that pretty white shaved cheese is that Wendy’s used. Then tomatoes, and sunflower seeds because those were so amazing in the other salad and I’m not sure I ever want to eat a salad without them again, and some leftover chicken/herb-flavored couscous, and Caesar dressing.  Meanwhile, I cooked five Tyson boneless buffalo wings in the toaster oven, then cut each one into nine pieces and put them on top. YUM.

Elizabeth and I were both waiting for the first day back to school after the long weekend, to see if there was anything new on the two-parties-on-the-same-day situation that emerged when she gave out her birthday party invitations on Friday. And there WAS something new: the other girl changed her party day. Whew.

********

The day before yesterday, all day I kept thinking, “WHY am I so HUNGRY??” I think the likely twofold answer is that I was smelling barbecue chicken cooking in the crockpot, and that every five minutes there was another emailed comment with another yummy salad idea.

Yesterday at lunch I intended to try a salad, but felt overwhelmed. Looking into the refrigerator, the combinations seemed too many and too difficult. “Maybe instead I will go out for Chinese food,” I thought. But then: a rush of resolve! A rising to the challenge! Things put out onto the counter one after another with decisive little smacks!

I took a picture I feel fails to capture any salad deliciousness at all, let alone the specific deliciousness of the particular salad, but it’s too late now, I have eaten the salad, and no one has ever mistaken this for a blog where people say “BEAUTIFUL picture, what settings?,” and the picture is already taken so let’s just place it into the post as intended and move on:

maybe if I’d photographed it before mixing

I started with a nice big bowl. I put in a bunch of the mixed spring greens.

Then I added some leftover shreddy barbecue crockpot chicken from dinner the night before. I felt very uncertain about HOW MUCH of each thing, but this is how we learn, so ONWARD, just scattered some chicken on it until I felt as if that was about how much chicken I might want to eat if it were on leaves instead of on a bun. A quarter cup or so, was my guess.

Then I cut a handful of grape tomatoes into halves/thirds/quarters and put those in. Then I put in a little leftover corn, but with a light hand because I’d had corn with my scrambled eggs that morning and wasn’t sure I wanted to have more corn. On the other hand, corn is so good in the Wendy’s BBQ Ranch chicken salad, and I was using BBQ chicken, so it seemed on-theme.

Then some shredded cheddar cheese, maybe a couple of tablespoons of it. Then some sunflower seeds, maybe a scant tablespoon. Then some shredded carrots, with a heavier hand because all of this is supposed to be about vegetables. Half a cup? Two-thirds? It’s hard to measure shreddy things anyway.

The whole time I was making the salad, I was feeling anxious about the dressing. Dressing feels as if it could immediately gross the whole salad. Then: inspiration! When I get the salad at Wendy’s, they always give me two packets of BBQ Ranch dressing but I only use one; I always save the extra packet Just In Case. I took one of those packets and put it on the salad. Then I mixed it up.

And it was GOOD. I really liked it! There was a nice amount of crunch: the carrot shreds and the sunflower seeds. Next time I would heat up the chicken, I think: it was fine cold, but I think I would have liked it even better warm. I also might tear up the lettuce a bit; I didn’t feel like messing with it this time while I was on such a tentative roll, but some of those leaves were the size of a cat’s head.

I finally watched Victor/Victoria (Netflix link), which I added to my list after reading a couple of books about Julie Andrews.

(image from Amazon.com)

There were a lot of things I liked about it. I was completely charmed to see Robert Preston from The Music Man working with Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music; I’ve watched both movies quite a few times. I liked James Garner in it, too, and it was fun to see Webster’s dad in something that wasn’t Webster.

(This reminds me to recommend The Garner Files, if you like celebrity autobiographies. I barely knew who James Garner was when I read it, and yet still enjoyed it and found it interesting. It’s been awhile, but I remember finding it funny, too. I think he looks a little like David Boreanaz. See?

(image from Amazon.com)

I also very much enjoy the way he puts the author’s name right on the cover, instead of implying he wrote it himself. /digression)

The main trouble I had with the movie is that Julie Andrews didn’t look or seem even one tiny bit like a man to me. Not one tiny bit. She looked and sounded like a poised lady the entire time. Possibly it’s that I’m too familiar with her as an actress (and particularly as a short-haired actress, so that when she dramatically Removes! Her! Wig!, she just looks like her regular self with her hair slicked back). But mostly it’s that she just Didn’t Look Like a Guy, At All, not even like a guy who was enormously successful at pretending to be a woman. She looked like a woman in a suit, and not even like a woman pretending to be a guy in a suit: just, like a woman in a suit. So it was difficult to get into that fairly major plot point of the movie, which is that she would be fooling and amazing audiences with her act.

I also found the musical acts themselves kind of meh. Everyone in the movie is just BLOWN AWAY by her talent, but I barely remember the songs or the performances—unlike movies such as The Sound of Music, where you could watch and re-watch it just to see the songs.

Regardless! I liked the movie and was glad to have seen it, and I feel increased affection for all the actors in it.

I was very interested to read this book:

(image from Amazon.com)

Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, by Jillian Lauren. Here is the description: “A jaw-dropping story of how a girl from the suburbs ends up in a prince’s harem.” Well! That sounds spicy!

But here is my understanding of “harem”: It’s like a collection of women, owned and cared for by the collector. They’re not paid; they may be given gifts, but it’s hard to know what ownership means if the person is owned by the gift-giver. They don’t come and go; they’re unlikely to be free to leave. They can be family, living there domestically with their children (as opposed to a more sordid image of the life there), but they’re not employees or guests.

And here is my understanding of “girl from the suburbs”: if you could equally well say “prostitute from the city,” and if in fact the latter term would be considered more accurate, then readers of the book are going to be a little disappointed.

What I was picturing before I read the book was a nice college girl traveling to another country, perhaps as part of her education, and ending up accidentally or deliberately part of a harem. Perhaps the girl would be majoring in journalism, so would turn the experience into a great story showing the inside of something we never get to see—and very likely de-sexualizing the image quite a bit. I wondered how she would manage to escape in order to publish the book.

The actual story is that woman working in New York City as a prostitute is hired to be a “party girl”: to come voluntarily and be paid to look pretty and be fun at the royal household’s nightly parties, and to have sex with the princes when they want to. She can leave if she wants to, and she does; she then returns; she then leaves freely a second time, taking her jewelry and clothing gifts with her each time. She is very well paid for this job. She’s not part of a harem, even though that’s what she calls it. We get a peek into the inner life of a hired party girl, not a peek into the inner life of a harem member.

As with many non-fiction books, this one seemed to have about two chapters of story stretched into a full-length book. The story is watered down with other talk about the author’s life. I found it very difficult to get into, in part because the story was so stretched out, in part because I was irritated that it was sold as one thing when it was actually another thing, and in part because I found the narrator so unlikeable. The way she describes other people is so mean (and done with such cunning faux innocence) it almost made me gasp—and if she was telling the truth, she failed to sell it. It’s one thing to “tell your story” and “not be ashamed,” and it’s another thing to publicly and viciously tell one side of a story, with the worst possible spin and assumptions, in a forum where the other side can’t respond. Reading it, I felt as if she’d noticed that other people got sympathy and pity when they used certain language and told their stories certain ways, and so she tried to copy/use that formula to make her own story sympathetic—but instead it reads as false/wily/manipulative/sociopathic. In the second half, her occasional brief sympathetic/self-aware remarks had become cumulatively successful (in a way that made me wonder if I were getting a better idea of her, or if I were succumbing to manipulation), so that I no longer found her unendurable—though still felt a strong urge to armchair-diagnose her, and still felt very sorry for everyone she skewered.

I don’t even recommend it as an “inner life of a party girl” story, because it wasn’t that interesting. What this book did was whet my appetite for someone ELSE to write such a book.

Last night I witnessed an unpleasant exchange on Facebook. (You: “Not on FACEBOOK! I can’t BELIEVE it!”) This was the gist: someone re-posted a comic strip that showed Jesus advocating some views that [*very very careful wording here*] SOME people, people who associate themselves with Christianity, use Christianity to defend—but views that MANY Christians find abhorrent and, when you see Jesus saying them in a little talk-bubble, it’s pretty clear those views are incompatible with and unrepresentative of Christianity. Then, Christian friends reacted to that comic strip, calling it disgusting, hurtful, anti-Christian, anti-Jesus, etc.

What was interesting was that, in the ensuing gross battle (which yet rages on, incidentally), everyone was on the same side. Are you following this? EVERYONE WAS ON THE SAME SIDE. But no one realized it! They thought they were DISagreeing! Everyone agreed that these views were incompatible with and unrepresentative of Christianity; that was the POINT of the comic strip. NO ONE, literally NO ONE INVOLVED, thought those views DID represent Christianity. If I could have pointed that out without getting involved, I would have. But you should have SEEN that mess; there was approximately 0% chance of me getting in there.

Anyway. I realize this makes for a strange pairing of subjects, but what I MEANT to talk about today was salad toppings. I am continuing in my cranky mission to increase fruits and vegetables—or rather, at this point, to KEEP them increased. When the weather gets warmer, it becomes easier to contemplate salad at lunchtime, so that is where I am heading. I brought home the BIG bag of mixed spring greens, and I am ready for topping recommendations!

Keep in mind that this is a NUTRITION salad, not in any way a WEIGHT-LOSS salad. This frees up huge swaths of delightful options, I’ll bet. Recently my sister-in-law and my sister-in-law’s sister and I shared a salad as part of an extensive and delicious snack, and it was just PACKED with yummy stuff: nuts and seeds and dried fruits and shredded carrots and apple chunks and really it was just great.

Here are some things I already have in the house:

mixed spring greens
a bag of broccoli/cabbage/carrot slaw? I don’t know, it looked interesting/hearty
shredded carrots
red bell pepper
mild yellow pickled pepper rings
frozen corn
grape tomatoes

roasted/salted sunflower seeds
raw pumpkin seeds
raw pecans
raw walnuts
roasted peanuts
pine nuts (I think)
roasted chickpeas in sea salt, cracked pepper, and chili flavors
canned chickpeas
canned black beans

dried cherries
dried cranberries
apples

eggs (I could hard-boil some)
cottage cheese
cheddar cheese
jalapeno cheese if I didn’t already eat it all
bacon bits
turkey bacon
boneless buffalo wings (I could cook a few, then cut them up)

several salad dressings: blue cheese, Italian, ranch, Caesar, probably some others
probably more stuff I’m not thinking of

I’m thinking just put it ALLLLL in. But what are some of your favorite combinations, or other toppings I should add to the shopping list?

I am not sure how many child-birthday-party posts I can expect the average person to be interested in, but it is a Major Topic at our house right now, so here is another one.

Elizabeth distributed her invitations on Friday, and a girl in her class (Elizabeth invited all the girls in her class) said, “Uh oh, we have a problem: that’s when MY birthday party is!” Elizabeth came home with this information, and we sat in silence for a moment, letting that sink in. I asked her a series of questions she didn’t have answers to, such as whether Emma was inviting all the girls in the class, and whether Emma’s invitations had been distributed yet. Elizabeth THINKS not to the latter, because she thinks she would be invited, and also because none of the other girls said “Oh, I can’t go to your party because I’m going to Emma’s,” and also because Emma didn’t say/indicate she had—but none of this is conclusive.

We concluded that there is no action for us to take at this point, except to wait in readiness. If we had not yet sent out invitations, and had received one from Emma for the same day we were planning ours, we would have changed our party day. That may or may not be possible for Emma’s parents, depending on what kind of party is planned, and whether reservations have been made, and whether it’s scheduled for a weekend out-of-town relatives will be visiting, or WHATEVER. We don’t have Emma’s parents’ contact info, or else I might email them and see what could be arranged; but they DO have OUR contact information, assuming Emma gave them the invitation. So they can change their party day, or they can contact us, or they can go ahead an issue their invitations for the same day, but in ANY case it’s their move not ours.

Another problem is that Edward also distributed HIS invitations on Friday, for the weekend BEFORE Elizabeth’s party (their actual birthday is between the two weekends). So as of the day before yesterday, if we’d found out about Emma’s party, we could easily have swapped Edward and Elizabeth’s parties. But as of the day we learned about Emma’s party, we would need to reschedule TWO parties, with TWO batches of guests to contact.

Well, again, we concluded there isn’t ANYTHING we can do at this point. Our role is to wait. My guess is that Emma’s invitations have NOT yet gone out, so we can also, if we like, feel happy and grateful that we sent ours out when we did.

Also, I’m so glad we don’t do this every year.

I am relieved to report that we FINALLY got Edward’s blood drawn at the lab. One thing that helped considerably is that I inadvertently activated a nurse to be our champion: she was the one who had faxed the lab orders the lab said they hadn’t received, and it raised her indignation (“I HAVE the fax RECEIPT! It SHOWS it WENT THROUGH!”). She must have turned this indignation into energy, because a few hours later I got a message from the lab, and the tone of the technician’s voice indicated a recent dressing-down and a new resolve to straighten up and fly right. They just wanted me to know that they had the lab orders, she said, and I was welcome to come in ANY TIME. I took Edward in first thing the next morning; he ended up an hour and a half late for school, but we GOT IT DONE.

I am hoping we will hear from the doctor and it will be, “Nope! Everything’s fine! Guess that last lab result was just a wonky one!” But it’s only a hope and not an expectation, because Edward has been complaining of stomachaches again. I’ve been noticing he looks a little pale. He seems more tired, and has been lying down more often. None of these things are good signs, Crohn’s-wise.

This makes me appreciate afresh Edward’s pediatric gastroenterologist, who all along has made it very clear that a sentence such as “The medication is working” needs to have “…for the time being” added to the end of it. “His labs look great!,” he’ll say, and then continue: “Looks like this medicine is really working for him right now!” At each appointment he reminds us that it’s not uncommon to have things change, and to let him know if symptoms (such as stomachaches, paleness, tiredness) return.

I was still hoping it wouldn’t be like that, though. Like, wow, year after year and Edward’s Crohn’s disease just KEEPS doing GREAT! Yay! The doctor can hardly believe it! The dose doesn’t even need to be increased due to growth, it just keeps working! It’s as if he doesn’t even HAVE Crohn’s!

Well. Anyway.

We had a near social disaster: Elizabeth said she put all the girls in her class on the invitation list for her birthday party, but I was slightly concerned—probably paranoid, but I wondered, what if she remembered ALL BUT ONE or something? I questioned her after she’d addressed all the invitations, and she was just SURE she’d remembered everyone. But I’d saved the class list we’d received for Fair Valentine’s Day Distribution, and said I’d check, Just In Case. And she HAD IN FACT FORGOTTEN JUST ONE GIRL. CAN YOU IMAGINE. BECAUSE I CAN IMAGINE, ALL TOO VIVIDLY. ALL BUT ONE! ALL BUT ONE! COMPLETELY BY ACCIDENT!!!! BUT WHAT GIRL OF ALL THE GIRLS IN THE UNIVERSE COULD BELIEVE THAT TO BE TRUE? *pant pant* Paul made her put three more invitations in her folder, JUST IN CASE there was some other issue, such as “Oh, I forgot so-and-so joined our class mid-year-after-Valentine’s-Day!” or whatever.

I just gave up on the book Hausfrau, and I wish I’d given up a lot sooner. I kept THINKING I should stop reading it because it was making me feel kind of depressed and sick and I was tired of the story interrupting itself, but then I kept going just because I’d gotten so far already and was still interested in finding out what would happen. And then two very upsetting things happened in the book. If I’d stopped reading it when I’d FELT like stopping, I wouldn’t have those things in my head.

Let’s talk about something else! Elizabeth wants to have her 10th birthday party at home, in our yard. This is the party I mentioned earlier, where I was braced for a big loud noisy expensive party, but I thought it would be somewhere ELSE, and that someone ELSE would be managing the children and cleaning up afterward. Instead it will be HERE, and the one managing/cleaning will be ME.

It’s the first time I’ve done such a thing, and I have a feeling there are a LOT of things people have learned from experience on this topic. I have some tips already from that earlier post. Elisabeth suggested: (1) have another adult around to help and commiserate, and (2) have an activity set up for the kids to do as they arrive, since some will arrive early and some late. Joanne suggested having the kids write their names on their cups and decorate them if they want to; that would be a good arrival activity. Katie suggested seeing if I can hire one or two of Rob’s friends to help out. These are all such good ideas.

The basic structure of the party is two hours in the back yard. I chose two hours because that seems to be the minimum party length, and I don’t want to do MORE than two hours.

I’ll have an arrival activity (decorating cups and/or a paper tablecloth, and/or running around in the yard), and also will be ready with a departure activity (probably more running around in the yard).

I’ll have a clipboard and paper for parents to write down their names and phone numbers. I will try to get all the parents to leave by putting on the invitation something like “drop-off at [time], pick up at [time],” and by helping them leave if they want to leave or don’t care either way (“Okay, we’ll see you back here at 3:00, then!”). I will not say “Go, have fun!” or “Enjoy your time off!” or anything similar, because I don’t know how to respond when other parents say it to me as I drop off one child and go home to deal with the other children.

If parents stay anyway, I will… I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll do with them. It gives me some comfort to have been on the other end of that relationship: when Elizabeth was younger, she didn’t want me to leave her at parties so I stayed. Here is what I and the other parents expected: to have a place we could stand and chat with each other, in sight of the children at the party. That’s it. Usually the host DID offer us cake or something, but I always felt as if I and the other parents were Not Officially There: we weren’t invited guests, we were more like our children’s security blankets. Existing and taking up space, but not in need of any official hosting.

We’re going to decorate by hanging regular balloons upside down from tree branches, and tying helium balloons to the mailbox (I’ve LOVED this when I’m trying to find a birthday child’s house) and to the stair railings and to anywhere else that seems good.

If it rains, we will have the party inside, heaven help us all. I will try to make it seem like a madcap adventure as I hiss at the other children to “clear the dining room table, QUICK. No, just shove everything into a laundry basket or something and GET IT OUT OF HERE!”

I’m letting her invite a dozen children, not because I specifically chose twelve, but because that was her full list of people she wanted to invite and that seemed okay. She’s inviting all girls. I said casually, “Are there any boys you want to invite?,” and she said, shocked, “NO!” As if I’d suggested she might want to serve broccoli instead of cake.

I have heard that some people actually drop off uninvited siblings as well as the invited child. I am just going to hope no one does that.

We’re having the party on a Sunday afternoon instead of a Saturday, because we’ve heard Saturday can be a busy day for kids who are doing sports, or who have siblings doing sports. That explains why SO MANY birthday parties are on Sundays around here. I’d wondered.

I’m pushing for cupcakes so I don’t have to cut and serve cake. We’ll have paper plates and plastic utensils. Elizabeth wants to have pizza too, but one of the girls she wants to invite has a severe dairy allergy, so I’m thinking NO on pizza; it’s a good time to teach the difference between “having things your way because it’s your birthday” and “being a considerate host.” If the guest with the allergy RSVPs a no, then…well, but by then the invitations will already have gone out. Perhaps I could email parents saying “Oh by the way, we’ve decided to have pizza too.”

I don’t know yet what to have to drink. Water? I don’t really want to deal with soda, and milk is out because of the child with a dairy allergy. But water doesn’t seem very festive. Maybe I should decide to deal with soda. I could get those cute little cans. Or juice boxes. Or a selection: little water bottles, little sodas, juice boxes.

For activities, she wants to play simple games like duck-duck-goose and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and ring-toss, but mostly just run around in the yard and play. We’ll get out the hula hoops and bouncy balls and other outdoorsy toys and have them lying around. She wants the game prizes to be very small so that people who don’t win anything won’t be as upset. Like, if there are lollipops in the goody bags, she wants the extra lollipops to be the prizes: then some people might get two lollipops, but everyone gets at least ONE.

I’ve noticed that for awhile there was a trend in our area toward NOT opening the presents at the party. That seems to have shifted back, and in any case I think we’ll have her open the presents at the party because it takes up TIME.

We’re not sure about the goody bags yet. We will have them, we know that. That’s all we know.

I am interested in ALL birthday-party talk. I am PARTICULARLY interested in tips, not only to make things easier and more manageable (though of course that is on my mind), but also tips to make things more FUN. I am a little worried, with so many of Elizabeth’s friends having/attending bounce-house parties and roller-skating parties and gymnastics parties, that duck-duck-goose in someone’s back yard will be a bit…dull. I don’t want to Pinterest every inch, but “This small thing was a surprising hit” can be INVALUABLE. And we have some money to play with: a location party would have started at around $250, and I don’t see any reason we can’t take some of that and redirect it to the Increase the Fun of a Backyard Party fund.