SIX! and Rainbow Leopard Birthday Success (Despite the Usual Bumps Along the Way)

You guys, I think I am going to LOVE age six.

I somehow managed to sidestep most of my Annual Mooning About My BAYYYYBEEEE Getting Older. I’m not going to lie – there were some tears, and some general stomping around that I attributed directly to said mooning. But it seemed less severe than in years past? Maybe because I was so busy?

Do you remember when I briefly fretted about Carla’s birthday a few months ago? I carried through with the rainbow leopard theme. (Cut to my perplexed mother-in-law, “Is ‘rainbow leopard’ a TV character?”) Making this theme work was Not Easy. Despite the fact that both rainbows and leopards are SUPER popular right now, I had the hardest time finding anything that combined the two. It was even tricky to find much that was leopard print!

BUT I SUCCEEDED.

Invitations

The invitations I wanted were too expensive (about $40 for 20 invitations, because of course you can only buy them in batches of 15 or 20, and we invited 16 girls) (and that $40 doesn’t include shipping [$7.99] or postage [$8.00]). Sigh.

Around here, people do e-vites for just about everything, so I started looking on e-vite sites and found these lovelies. But my husband refused to pay money to send an e-vite, so I GRUDGINGLY admitted that probably not a single parent would even remember the theme of our e-vite and sent a free one that was about painting (Carla had a painting party at one of those places geared toward women who want to drink wine and paint sunsets.). I was NOT PLEASED because I like things to match all the way through, but OH WELL.

Paper Goods and Other Decor

After you all kindly recommended against spending $60 on rainbow leopard print paper plates and napkins on Zazzle, I came to my senses. (I mean, I wasn’t REALLY going to do it anyway.) (Was I?) I started looking for alternatives.

Lots of places had rainbow options – Party City has an especially large selection. (Side note: Only one place I looked – was it Party City? I can’t remember – had an array of plain napkins/plates in all the colors of the rainbow. I would have gone with that a long time ago, but it was one of the last places I looked.) But man did I want rainbow leopard ones! I kept googling and searching Amazon and Target. And then one day the clouds parted and a little lightbulb appeared over my head and it said, “Walmart!” So I went to the Walmart website and voila! There were the EXACT PLATES AND NAPKINS I had been dreaming of! And GOLD leopard print candles, to boot! AND the plates and napkins were something like $2 a package! I spent $12 total. A STEAL.

(Photos from walmart.com. The cake is there only to illustrate the leopard print candles, which is difficult to glean from the photo alone.)

Of course, they were only available in the store, and the store in question was 45 minutes away. But I drove that 45 minutes, I’ll tell you! I haven’t been in a Walmart in years and I don’t feel any urge to go back again soon, but it really came through for me in a pinch.

Before I found the magical Walmart plates, I was planning on using plain plates in rainbow colors. So I bought some rainbow leopard print cupcake wrappers, excuse me, baking cups, so that there would be some rainbow leopard flair on the plain plates. I ended up using them anyway, despite the overabundance of rainbow leopard print. They were very cute and, even though there were 36 in the package, I wish I had bought more of them.

Amazon had balloons that matched the baking cups, so I bought two of those. Even though our local balloon place claims they can’t guarantee balloons you buy outside of their store, I have had good luck bringing in my own balloons. And the rainbow leopard balloons lasted much longer than the regular latex balloons (in rainbow colors) I ordered from the balloon place.

This balloon would still be hanging around if I had not finally popped it like I did all the other ones. My child goes NUTS for balloons, which is very cute but also prevents her from doing things in a timely fashion like brushing her teeth or going to bed.

By the way, did you know there is a helium shortage?!?! There IS! So the balloon place only allowed you to get, like, ten balloons. (I certainly did not need more than ten balloons.) And that number was lower if you had mylar balloons. It was wild.

Party Favors

The whole reason I went with this rainbow leopard theme in the first place is because I found the perfect party favor.

 

 I am cute and cuddly and also a Rainbow Mother Effin’ Leopard.

Photo from amazon.com

Listen, kids LOVE the favor bags they get at parties – the ones with little jars of bubbles and tattoos and pencils and bracelets and tiny containers of slime. They go bonkers for that stuff. My kid sure does. But I am a Mean Mom and I do not like that stuff in my house. It ends up on the floor or in a drawer and heaven forbid I try to throw it away because it is SO PRECIOUS.

So I fight this trend in my own way, by spending what I would have spent on tchotchkes on a single gift. Last year I did a unicorn search-and-find book. The year before, when Carla had a pizza party, I gave the kids a Curious George and the Pizza Party book. This year, I had my eye on a rainbow leopard plushy, which I knew Carla would go NUTS for (she loves stuffed animals) and which was $5 apiece at Party City. (Michael’s later had a sale on the very same leopards, but the sale was only applicable in-store, and I didn’t feel like running around to all the Michael’s stores in the region to track down 16 leopards, if they even existed in such a quantity. Plus I found the sale something like four days before Carla’s party, so I was already panicked about OTHER things.)

So I got 16 leopards and my mother-in-law and I wrapped them in plastic favor bags and tied each bag with a rainbow of ribbon colors. The girls loved them.

I also got Carla a bigger version, for $8 from Amazon, and a little keychain version from Claire’s for $3. She loves having a mommy and a baby leopard, too. And now I have three rainbow leopards of varying sizes in my house, but it’s still better than a bag of tchotchkes.

The Sweet Treats

As in previous years, I made cupcakes for the friends birthday party and a cake for the family birthday party. I used this tried-and-true cake recipe for the cake and I used boxed mix for the cupcakes. The cake recipe makes GOOD cake (and my ex-confectionary caterer mother-in-law says it has a really nice crumb), but, as I have said before, it is DENSE. The denseness was a good thing for this recipe, because it is a layer cake which requires nice sturdy cake to hold up to the all the frosting, and, frankly, the batter was nice and thick which was a desirable consistency for all the piping I had to do. But I really think I need to just go with a mix in future years. (I have said this before.) I find that it tastes just as good (and I always amp up the vanilla flavor with extra vanilla bean paste) and the texture is just so much softer, which I prefer.

(Note to Future Me: NO ONE CARES if it comes from a box! And you like it better!)

Making rainbow leopard baked goods was very time consuming. First you have to make your batter. Then you have to divide it and color it.

So many dishes.

Then you have to do the layers. Simple enough, but time consuming.

In brief: You do a thin layer of white batter. Then you draw thin concentric circles in black. Then you “trace over” the black circles in a thick layer of colored batter, varying the color order so that you don’t have a big clump of all-purple spots. Then you “trace over” the colored circles in another thin layer of black batter. Then you fill in and cover everything with a thin layer of white. Then you repeat, making sure to vary your color order every time, until your cupcake cups/cake pans are half full.

I kept forgetting which colors I’d used… and forgetting whether I’d remembered to add the top layer of black batter… And at one point I ran out of white batter and had to make a new batch. SIGH. I learned the hard way that you really have to use MORE of the colored batter circles in between your black batter circles – that seems to be the key to getting real leopard-like spots.

Cute even before you open it up!

The cake is the same thing, batter wise.

Much easier to do a thin stripe of black and a thick stripe of color because I had more batter/surface area to work with. I also used a smaller piping tip for the black batter.

And then the frosting is hard, too – you have to make it, do your crumb coat, chill your cake, divide out the rest of your batter, color it. Then you have to frost the thing. I bought myself a cake turntable (this particular one because it also came with icing tips, and I wanted more icing tips because I had so many colors to work with, and a bunch of icing bags, and a frosting scraper, AND a bunch of other useful goodies – totally worth it; would buy again), which was tremendously helpful in frosting this particular cake. You pipe on big thick strands of frosting in the color order you want, and then you hold the frosting scraper vertically against the side of the cake and turn the turntable and the frosting gets nice and smooth. We all have our particular gifts, and doing anything resembling straight lines is not one of mine, so the layers were neither even nor straight. But I still thought it came out well. For my skill set.

The top was another matter. It seems like it would be much the same thing: you pipe on big thick circles of frosting in the color order of your choice and then position the scraper so that one corner is in the middle and the other corner is at the very edge of the cake (this only worked for me, by the way, because my cakes were six-inch rounds; you’d need a much bigger icing scraper for a bigger cake) and then you gently press down while turning the turntable. Not as easy. Despite my crumb coat, some of the frosting kept un-sticking from the cake and I had to re-pipe some colors, which resulted in some color bleeding and a VERY thick top layer of frosting.

The top view is not as perfect as I’d like, but WE PUSH ON NONETHELESS.

Oh well. This is what happens when you are an amateur home baker, I guess.

I would say that both the cake and the cupcakes were successful. The cupcakes slightly moreso, both from an aesthetic and taste perspective. I did some practice cupcakes, which looked NOTHING like leopard print inside. But I think I figured out where I was going wrong, and in the end, the leopard print spots looked leopard-y enough if you squint.

Take 1: This is when I realized I needed to really amp up my use of the colored batter.

Take 2: Slightly better on the color-to-black-batter ratio, but now not enough spots.

Final take: Not perfect, but pleasingly leopard-ish. The kids LOVED these, by the way.

OH. I also was dithering about the frosting for the cupcakes. I thought about doing rainbow swirls. But instead, I found some rainbow leopard print edible toppers on Etsy (from CustomCakeImage4U). They came promptly, they were super easy to use, and I think they looked really cute. They were expensive, but I had an Etsy gift card and this seems like the perfect thing to spend it on. So the final product may be garishly overly leopard-y, but I had a theme and I WENT ALL THE WAY with it.

So charming in their little box! The cupcake toppers feel like heavy plasticky paper. You just set them on top of the frosting, kind of smooth them on, and then let them meld for a few hours.

I don’t think the cupcakes were as pretty as the unicorn cupcakes last year or as vivid as the rainbow cupcakes the year before, but I feel fairly pleased with them.

The cake was, as I said, a bit disappointing texturally. But I think the colors came out exactly right. Very Lisa Frank.

 

The lines aren’t perfect and it’s not perfectly straight but I am still pleased.

The internal spots, while definitely not as leopard-y as I wish they had been (they came out more stripe-y, I’d say), were at least leopard-y enough to give the appropriate leopard impression.

And I ended up feeling very pleased with the frosting. I did the black dot outlines (I have no idea what else to call them) by hand with black frosting (I bought special super black food coloring for the black batter and frosting so they would look truly black and not grey) and I think they turned out well.

So much frosting.

Did I mention that MY OVEN DIED? It did. I had already made the cupcakes. But I was in the middle of piping colored frosting into my cake pans when I realized I needed to preheat my oven. I turned it on… and it just never heated up. (Turns out the ignitor was dead. It is fixed now.)

I took my cake pans over to my neighbor and asked if I could use her oven, and she said yes because she is a dear, darling saint of a woman, and her oven cooked them PERFECTLY. And I had an extra excuse (besides too much baking) to eschew cooking for the weekend.

These two breezy paragraphs make it seem like my oven dying amid the most stressful and emotionally fraught time of year was no big deal. And it really wasn’t, in the grand scheme of things. But at the time I WAS A MESS. It was a DISASTER. Anyway, all’s well that ends well.

While I still think my rainbow cake takes the cake (heh) for being the prettiest, most professional cake I’ve ever made, I feel satisfied with this rainbow leopard cake. It’s not perfect, but it got the job done. And I don’t need to do it ever again.

The Party

The biggest birthday disappointment (for me) (moreso even than the oven dying) was the party itself. It was, as I said, held at one of those paint-while-you-drink places. They specifically offer a KIDS’ BIRTHDAY PARTY, and I specifically asked for — and was told I would get — an instructor who is good with kids, but nonetheless it was not a good fit. I could rant on for thousands of words except a) boring and b) I already sent many Very Displeased paragraphs to the company via their online feedback process (and have heard NOTHING) so I will spare you. Suffice it to say it was not a good choice.

Impromptu table scape my dear mother-in-law set up after they informed us that the party room in which our party was to be held didn’t have enough chairs or table space for all 16 girls. Wait, no, they didn’t inform us; I counted the chairs at the single table they had for us and realized there were only EIGHT. For SIXTEEN girls. Even though I’d had to tell them ahead of time how many kids were coming, and even though I’d visited in advance, and they’d shown me the room (with a different set up, so I didn’t know about the lack of space issue), and I’d planned my entire decor set up (tablecloths, snacks, etc.) based on being in that other room. I AM STILL NOT OVER IT. Thank goodness for my mother-in-law. Look how she folded the Walmart napkins so that they all say happy birthday! Look at how she used WRAPPING PAPER as a tablecloth! Genius! Savior!

Well. For ME it was not a good choice. The kids seemed to enjoy themselves. Some of the things that I hated – lack of specific, clear instructions geared toward a six-year-old, unanticipated breaks during which nothing was planned, looooong stretch of time at the end that was supposed to STILL BE PAINTING PARTY (I am not going to start; deep breaths) (this is just the tip of the complaint iceberg; deep breaths) – the girls either didn’t mind, didn’t notice, or straight-up loved those things. They each painted a painting, and their wildly diverse interpretations of the exemplar painting were super cute and they all got to take those home with them. Plus, they are all schoolmates, so they had fun together. Carla, I must point out, seemed to really have a great time. And I suppose that’s all that matters.

(Grumble, grumble, I am so glad I thought to bring packages of [rainbow] goldfish so that we had something to do when the instructor said, at 10:30 in the morning, that it was time for a break so the paint could dry and the kids could eat. The pizzas were not arriving until 11:30! No one had told me there would be a break in the middle of the morning! What the manager told me was that the party would be 90 minutes of painting and then we’d have one hour for eating and hanging out! ARRRGHHHH!)

The painting exemplar that all the kids were instructed to paint. Not a leopard, but at least it’s got the RAINBOW thing going for it.

Carla’s interpretation. I am going to frame it and hang it in our living room whenever I finally get  around to making a gallery wall. 

Anyway, it all worked out okay. (Grumble, grumble.) But I would NOT recommend this particular place for your birthday party needs. Not for six-year-olds, at least. I don’t know if it would be better for adults, but at least it’s probably easier to overlook some of the disappointing stuff if you’re sipping from a big ol’ bottle of wine.

The Newly Minted Six-Year-Old

Birthday party woes and triumphs aside: Let’s talk about the kiddo herself.

Five was a great year. But now, we are six. And six is great so far. My big kiddo (heaven help you if you call her “little”) (“I am NOT little, Mommy! I am big!”) still wakes up singing. She is the most cheerful, agreeable person I know, even as she is cheerfully, agreeably doing exactly what SHE wants instead of what you have asked her twenty-nine times to do. She is curious and enthusiastic and full of ideas. She is actually, really, truly READING now, although I think she’d still prefer it to be EASY at all times. She is still in nonstop motion from dawn until her body finally just shuts off, midthought, at a later time than one might hope. She is fun in new and unanticipated ways – participating in real conversations at dinner time, for instance. She craves responsibility and gets so visibly proud when you cheer her efforts and successes. She loves Barbie and the Wow! in the World podcast and stuffed animals and Piggie and Gerald.

I got to see, for the first time, an example of the “leader” she can be in a group setting. Her teachers have been saying this for years, that she’s a leader, that other kids are drawn to her and want to follow her lead. I thought that was code for “bossy,” to be honest. Or maybe… a kinder, more diplomatic way of reframing what we once called “bossy.” And, yes, she certainly seems to enjoy ordering people around. But at her birthday party, the staff member at the painting place was less than experienced at working with the six-year-old set. Turns out that there is some downtime during the painting experience, during which the kids do… what? No one prepared me for this, and I, too, am inexperienced with entertaining a large group of giggly first graders. He tried, at first, but his voice was too gentle and/or the game he suggested was not doing it for this crowd. When the kids were uninterested and started milling about in a vaguely pre-chaotic manner, Carla took over. She – very loudly; her voice needs no megaphone – directed everyone in a game of Three Things (where someone gives three clues and the group has to guess what the person is describing). Everyone listened to her and participated in the game until the instructor said it was time to resume painting. Later, she led the entire group in some loud chanting. And, seeing her potential, I then asked her to redirect the group into something more positive, which she did! And then, when the painting party ended a FULL HALF HOUR before it was supposed to, she led the kids in a dance party and then in a series of poses that I was able to photograph for posterity. They ALL listened to her and enthusiastically did what she ordered them to asked. It was magic.

She is such a great kid. She becomes more interesting and more kind and more fun and more challenging and more HER every year that I know her. I am so deeply grateful that she is my daughter. That I get to be her mom.

There you go, Internet. Another birthday in the books.

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Tuesday Randomosity: Pre-Trip Panic and Additional Fretful Absurdities Edition

I am skipping today’s Dinners This Week post. I mean, there’s no need to plan dinners when you’ll be eating dinner on an airplane, right? Let’s have some randomosity. Join me, won’t you?

First, let’s have some medicinal nachos:

Chips. Top with cheese. Melt for 30 seconds in the microwave. Top with black beans and frozen corn. Microwave for another 20 seconds. Top with copious amounts of my favorite hot sauce. Add avocado, diced onion, and sour cream. Cilantro if you have it/don’t hate it. Tomatoes if you swing that way. Squeeze a wedge of lime over everything. Add copious amounts of sriracha for good measure. DEVOUR.

• A lot of my fretting about Leaving My Bayyyyyybeeeeee has been channeled into Shoe Panic. As in, how am I going to walk around Europe for ten days without reducing my delicate feet to bloody shreds? So I have purchased and returned approximately 90,000 pairs of shoes in the past week. Nothing like leaving an important aspect of your planning to the very last minute!

 

• These are the shoes I have ended up with: Skechers Go Walk Evolution Ultra sneakers (why do all athletic shoes have such ridiculous names?) and Vionic Minna ballet flats (in color “sand”) because I wanted to have walk-friendly shoes that were dressy enough for a nice-ish dinner.

 

• Building on some of your great ideas for making the trip easier on Carla, I have bought her some books and other little fun surprises to open while we’re gone. There is a real dearth of fun, story-based children’s books about the very specific locations we are traveling to, which is DISAPPOINTING, but I did find this book about one of the cities on our itinerary:

• You know that one of my big panics is Death By Airplane, right? So I have been desperately trying to get our life insurance upgraded just in case. Of course, the process takes waaaaayyyyy longer than I thought it would, so we just squeaked our medical exams in at the last minute and there is no way the underwriting will be complete before we leave. (I use these terms like I have any idea whatsoever how any of this works, which I do NOT.) HOWEVER. Did you know that you can get provisional coverage, based on the assumption that you will get approved? So that’s what we’re doing. We can pay a premium as though we’ve been approved, and then, when we come back home, ALIVE, we can pay any additional amount as needed. And if we perish while overseas, we’re covered. (I mean, as long as we are approved and have paid the correct amount; I’m assuming my parents could pay any difference after the fact.) Cool, right!?! Okay, maybe my calibration of “cool” has shifted in odd ways.

 

• In other morbid planning, I tried to record myself singing to Carla. There are two songs I have been singing to her at bedtime all her life – one I made up while pregnant with her and the other is “Moon River” – and I have this desperate feeling that I MUST record myself singing them so she can listen to the songs (but will she?) to comfort her (but will they?) after my fiery death. But I can’t record myself! It’s so ridiculous! In every recording, I keep SWALLOWING in the middle of sentences. Like, “Mooooooon river, wider than a mile, I’m crossing [gulp] you in style someday…. [gulp] Dream maker, you heart [gulp] breaker….” It’s really distracting and annoying and I cannot NOT do it. I mean, have you ever tried to NOT SWALLOW when your body is telling you to swallow? And then try to SING while not swallowing? It’s absurd and obviously some sort of weird self-conscious reaction to recording myself. Do not suggest that I ask my husband to record me actually singing to Carla, because then I would die of embarrassment and also we are out of time. I am going to choose the least gulpy of the options and THAT’S JUST HOW CARLA WILL HAVE TO REMEMBER ME.

 

• Abrupt subject change: Our Amazon Echo (Alexa) has begun telling me to enjoy my day. “Have a nice day,” she’ll say after I ask for the weather in the morning. “Have a good afternoon,” she’ll say sometimes after I’ve asked for the news briefing. It’s creepy but nice? And she only says it to me. She has never once used any sort of pleasantry with my husband. Also creepy? But it makes me feel vindicated in using “please” and “thank you” when making requests of her. My husband may not be on the good side of the AI after the uprising, but hopefully Alexa will put in a good word for me.

 

• While I’m worrying about wholly unimportant things (recap: dying on my totally voluntary trip overseas; the state of my footwear for said trip; singing lullabies without swallowing; the inevitable AI uprising; will I have enough nachos to last until we leave for Europe?), let’s add in some panic about Carla’s birthday party. I think we have the venue down. And Carla has shifted from Tiger Theme to Seahorse Theme to Mommy, You Choose A Theme From These Five Cat-Related Categories Plus Foxes. So I am leaning toward Rainbow Leopard Theme, mainly because I have found the perfect party favor:

• And the perfect cake to torture myself with making. (My husband heaved a great world-weary sigh when I told him about it and asked if I might consider just BUYING a cake.) (No.) (Does he know me?)

 

• But I can’t find any great theme-appropriate invitations; some decent ones, but nothing I LOVE. And, WORSE, because I will panic about LITERALLY ANYTHING meaningless in the grand scheme of things, I cannot find any theme-appropriate paper plates and napkins. I can order them via Zazzle for around $60 for 40 to 50 plates-or-napkins, but can we all agree that spending $60 on 40 paper plates for a single party is excessive? I’m not saying it can’t be DONE; I wouldn’t judge anyone for spending $60 on 40 plates if that’s how they chose to spend their hard-earned money. But I think $1.70 cheetah-print paper plate — PAPER, not even hard plastic — is excessive and I really want to avoid it if at all possible.

 

• So maybe foxes? I haven’t looked it up, but foxes could be a good alternative, right? It’s just that they are so Off Brand for my particular child, who wears leopard print probably three days a week (today she is wearing a faux fur cheetah print vest over a green dress and black leggings with faux leather patches; she has a very particular sense of style, this kid) and has leopard print boots and pretends to be a rotating cast of leopards/cheetahs/panthers on a daily basis. I am already exhausted by planning this party and I haven’t really even begun.

 

• Please keep in mind that I KNOW that none of this is important, it’s a birthday party, not the Oscars or some other party that actually matters/has wide visibility, and really ALL parties pale in comparison to, like, climate change and gun control and matters of REAL IMPORT. I am not overlooking the absolute absurdity of wasting brainpower on this frivolity.

 

• Frivolity continues: And what are we going to get Carla for her actual gift? She is fresh out of ideas, unless you count “more Barbies!” as an idea which I do not. The only things I can come up with are a) a new bike (although she has a perfectly good hand-me-down bike that will probably last her at least another year, in terms of being the right height, not to mention she staunchly refuses to let us remove the training wheels) and b) a doll, because she seems to finally be more interested in dolls than in stuffed animals. She has repeatedly asked for a basket for her bike, so she can collect things (acorns, pinecones, rocks) when she goes for bike rides… but I don’t think “needs a basket” is enough of a reason to buy a whole new bike… I don’t know. I am on the fence. What is the six-year-old set into these days?

 

• I LOVED dolls as a child, and my mom got me a couple of Corelle (?) dolls that I cherished and played with for many years. (Oh wait, it turns out they are COROLLE dolls – Corelle is a type of dishware, it seems. My bad.) Is Corolle still a good way to go, doll-wise? American Girl dolls seem to be popular around here… although they are SO expensive I don’t think I am ready to travel down that road. I also used to love Cabbage Patch Dolls, are those still A Thing? (Ugh, I am cringing thinking about how the “preemie” Cabbage Patch Dolls were so coveted when I was a little girl. I guess March of Dimes used them to raise awareness about premature birth, but that went right over my head at the time. I can imagine it being a hurtful thing for lots of parents.) What is the current Doll Trend, is what I want to know? I thought, being a parent, this knowledge would sort of magically manifest in my brain but I WAS WRONG.

 

• Speaking of brains: does your brain do that thing where, when overtired, it fixates on one word or phrase or song lyric to the exclusion of all other thoughts? Mine has been choosing “It’s raining tacos,” itself an agonizingly repetitive song, to replay ad nauseum in my head, at 2:30 am and beyond. Fun.  (No.)

 

• My Inevitable Death Panic (which is both panic about my inevitable death and an inevitable panic about death) is manifesting in lots of cleaning, which is good, I suppose. But I have failed to take any Before photos, which makes it poor blog fodder. I just want you to know that I have done a LOT of work and gotten rid of a LOT of crap. I am kind of hoping my mom will open some drawers and marvel at how spare and tidy they are. “Maybe she died in a plane crash taking a totally unnecessary trip abroad, but, man, are her drawers neat and clean!” they’ll say at my funeral.

 

• Let’s have one more photograph of medicinal nachos. These were yesterday’s, so I need to see if I have enough ingredients for another heaping dose before I make my way to The Land of Sausages and Schnitzel. DOCTOR’S ORDERS.

Okay. Enough. What’s up with you, Internet? Lord knows we have enough Big Serious Issues at hand to ensure we never sleep again. But what utterly frivolous things are keeping you up at night?

By the way, my husband and I decided to limit ourselves to one phone while overseas, and it is his phone, so blog posting/reading is likely to be light/nonexistent while we’re gone. I promise photos of castles if when we return.

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Wednesday Randomosity: A Little Half-Hearted Edition

Thank you so much for your helpful ideas and soothing words on my post about my upcoming trip. While I do not know how to make a paper chain, I really like the idea of having some way for her to “count down” until our return. So I plan to write notes to Carla every day, so her grandparents can read them to her. I will include little tidbits about where we are and what we’re doing. And I ordered some books for her to open every few days as little surprises.

Life is busy with preparations, because of course I have thrown myself into totally de-cluttering my house in response to pre-trip nerves. So here is an abbreviated randomosity for you.

• A spatula got caught in the bottom heating element of our dishwasher (she says, not knowing any of the technical terms although pretty firm on “spatula”) and melted. Our house smelled like acrid burnt plastic for a VERY long time, and our dishwasher STILL smells horrid, despite having been run through several times.

 

• Carla wants a tiger themed birthday this year. Great. I love tigers. But… I am not seeing a whole lot of tiger-themed accessories. Unless you want Daniel Tiger, which I do not.

 

• I have found a tutorial for a tiger striped cake!

 

• Speaking of Carla and her birthday: I have just purchased the relevant book in Louise Bates Ames’s amazing, soothing, and very helpful series about children. “Loving and Defiant” is the subtitle. Yes, yes that does describe a certain someone in a very accurate nutshell. One of the characteristics of this age is, apparently, a return to the intense ambivalence of age two. Which was helpful to know the other day when I applied some spray to Carla’s hair to help it be curly and she (defiantly) combed it out, saying she wanted her hair STRAIGHT. And then not two minutes later burst into tears because she wants it to be CURLY. Thank you, Louise, for making this a totally reasonable incident and not something that left me baffled and reeling for the rest of the day.

 

• No one in this household requires child safety locks on the cabinets, yet they remain on the handles, dangling, useless.

 

That’s all I’ve got! Tell me what’s going on with you, Internet.

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Non-Food Things I Am Fretting About

If you thought that we could return to fret-free normalcy now that the dinner party is over, you were WRONG.

Let’s move right along to the next fretworthy topic, shall we?

My husband and I are going on a trip. Just the two of us. We are not calling it a second honeymoon, although I suppose that’s what it is; it’s our tenth anniversary gift to one another.

We are going to Europe and we are both VERY EXCITED about it.

But.

We are leaving Carla behind.

She will remain in our house in the loving and capable hands of my parents. She will be continuing with her regular routine of school and extracurricular activities. But I am FREAKING OUT about leaving her.

Firstly, the longest I’ve ever been away from her is a week.

Secondly, the longest my husband and I have together been away from her is two days.

Thirdly, I am really worried my husband and I are going to die in a plane crash and leave her an orphan.

Fourthly, I am FREAKING OUT.

So I am hoping you have some advice for me as we prepare to leave our beloved baby behind.

We have mentioned the trip several times, with increasing frequency as we get closer to the trip. So Carla knows it’s coming. I don’t know if this is a good strategy or not; my concern is that we’re making her think/fret about it too much in advance. But I also don’t want to spring it on her. That would be awful and cruel (at least, for my particular kid), to wake up one day and say, “Bye! See you in ten days!”

I have been making a ridiculous number of lists for my parents, so they know everything from the foods she will and might eat to how to walk her into school each morning to what she needs to bring to ballet class.

I have talked things over with her teachers, who seem very unconcerned with the whole thing. (Bless Carla’s teacher: when I told her recently that I thought our being gone would be rough, she immediately said that I can email her or call her ANY TIME. When really I meant that things would be rough on Carla, not on me. She knows me to my CORE, apparently.)

What else can I do?

When my mom went to Russia for a week or two when I was… five? ten? she recorded herself reading Nancy Drew books, so I could play them on cassette tapes at bedtime. What a kind and loving thing for her to do! Maybe I need to do something similar?

When I was in California for a writing conference, and the time difference made phone calls difficult, I made little videos for Carla each morning that my mother-in-law could play for her after school. I think Carla liked those, but it seemed like they may also have made her upset and teary at bedtime? But maybe she would have been upset and teary anyway? I don’t know. I am wondering whether my husband and I should try to Facetime her every day, or if it would make her miss us more?

How else can I make Carla more comfortable about our leaving? How else can I make ME more comfortable about our leaving?

And how are we supposed to say goodbye to her, when she then has to go to school while we prance off to the airport? Do we drop her off and say goodbye in her classroom? That seems awful, but also her teachers would be Right There to distract her. Do we say goodbye at home and let my parents drop her off? DO WE CANCEL THE WHOLE TRIP?

Have you and your spouse ever left your child for a longish time? What were some things you did to prepare yourself/your child? Were there any things you wish you had/hadn’t done?

It’s going to be okay, right? RIGHT?

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Bad Day Already

The day is not off to a good start.

Part of it is actual, part of it is mental, part of it is diet-al.

Part the first: I have managed to make my child simultaneously hate school and believe that her teachers are going to be mad at her if she isn’t perfect. We had parent teacher conferences last week, and her teachers mentioned a couple of things Carla needed to work on. And I mentioned those things to her, and we talked about some strategies, and she got really cranky and irritable with me and then we moved on. We had a lovely weekend. This morning, she waltzed into my room in one of her signature amazing ensembles (purple pants, pink shirt, faux leopard fur vest, sparkly headband) in a happy mood and snuggled with me until my alarm went off. I reminded her this morning about what we had discussed, and it was like flipping a switch. All of a sudden she was hot and would I take her temperature. No fever. She was really tired and naptime at school is way too far away so she wants to stay home. She doesn’t want to go to school. She’s NOT going to school. I tried to figure out what the deal was – she LOVES school; over the weekend, we drove past her school and the parking lot was full and she said “No fair! Those kids get to be there on the weekend!” – and eventually got out of her that she thinks she won’t be able to do what we discussed and her teachers will be mad at her. So. No school. She’s done.

Well shit.

I tried everything in my Mommy Toolkit to persuade her: Assurance: We don’t expect you to be perfect, we expect you to try your best. Your teachers love you. Here are all the wonderful things they told me about you at the conference. Here are all the things for which your father and I are so proud of you. Bribery: If you go to school today, you get to do X! I will let you bring your horse in the car on the way to school! If you still feel bad at school, you can go to the nurse and she will call me to come get you! Logic: School is your job, you have to go. If Daddy didn’t want to go to work, what would happen? It’s a law that kids your age have to go to school. Mild threats: If you don’t go, here are all the fun things you will miss. If you stay home, you will be bored; no TV, I have work to do so I can’t play with you. And – bringing out the big guns – I will make you go on ERRANDS with me. She was undeterred.

Finally, after assuring her for the ten thousandth time that neither her teachers nor I would be mad at her, that none of us expects her to be PERFECT, that we just want her to TRY… After singing her the Daniel Tiger song about “your best is the best for you”… After coming up with some specific strategies to try with her teachers… FINALLY, I got her out the door. We were thirty-five minutes late.

And then, when I was telling her teacher about the strategies we had discussed and explaining what had happened, I of course burst into tears. Because nothing makes a Bad Parenting Morning worse than leaking it all over your child’s poor teacher. The only saving grace was that we were so late, there weren’t many other parents lingering in the halls to see me blubbering.

Man, I really screwed things up. And I don’t know exactly HOW, or exactly how to fix it, or how to do it differently. And she still needs to work on the things she needs to work on, although obviously they are not DIRE. (Though I managed to get poor Carla to feel that they ARE dire.) And my heart just feels so RAW for her, because she is working so hard at growing up – so, so hard – and she wants to please us and her teachers so badly, and she is so much more sensitive than sometimes even I realize. And of all people in the world, I should be the one who KNOWS what she needs and understands how to get through to her without screwing her up and I DON’T.

So that’s the actual.

The mental is the crushing certainty that I am the absolute worst choice of person to be a parent. And that nonetheless I have to do it anyway. And at stake are my child’s PERMANENT HAPPINESS AND WELL BEING.

There is also the outward spiraling, wherein I begin to feel that everything else in life is terrible too: our house is falling apart, I can’t keep up with the to-do list, I am failing as a writer. You know. One bit of the scaffolding gets knocked in and the whole structure comes tumbling down.

Then there’s the diet-al, which is stupid and I should just QUIT because it’s making me miserable. I have a constant headache. I feel nauseated and my brain seems to be going at half speed. I am not particularly hungry or missing foods all that much, but I do have a rather abnormally intense fixation on Diet Coke.

You can see how this all adds up to a bad morning so far.

Two things I am using to try to pull myself out of this negativity quicksand:

1. The diet is over as of Thursday morning. I will be celebrating with a big bowl of pasta and a thick slice of cake.
2. I have a pedicure scheduled with a friend for Friday, which should be relaxing and my friend and I will get to chat and catch up.

And between me, my husband, and Carla’s teachers, we should be able to figure out how to redirect her perfectionism… somehow? Right?

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Parenting Moan

Poor Carla is just off  lately. Saturday she ate practically nothing – some bacon and a tomato from her BLT at lunch, a handful of fries; a peanut butter sandwich at our friends’ house that night – and then she ate a great lunch yesterday but literally NOTHING for dinner. Not a single bite. She requested instead to go to bed. But then she woke up at 11:30 and could NOT fall back to sleep. She was up until well past two. Two a.m. in the morning. And if by “she was up” you are assuming that maybe I was sleeping, no. I was reading Harriet the Spy and playing YouTube “spa music” and fetching water and taking her temperature and reading old favorite picture books and giving her Tylenol because her “neck” hurt when she swallowed and making a “nest” in my room beside my bed and lying quietly in the dark and hissing at Carla in my most soothing way to just be STILL and close your EYES.

No surprise that she was dragging this morning. She didn’t eat as much for breakfast as I thought (hoped) she would – most of her smoothie, one French toast stick – and was just kind of slow. Which could be tired slow. Or not-feeling-great slow. Or just plain old Kindergarten Slow. Who knows.

Why is so much of parenting so unknowable? That’s what I’m bemoaning this morning. I mean, I get it. There’s no handbook. No two kids are alike. Yada yada blah. But I have had this particular kid for nearly six whole years so you’d think I’d at least have the hang of dealing with her by now. But you’d have thought incorrectly, I’m sorry to say. (Mainly sorry for me, not so much for you and your misplaced faith in my supposed parenting “ability.”)

There are so many QUESTIONS. And I have answers to SO FEW of them! Sure, some things, like “should she be holding that sharp knife?” and “should I give her a hug?” have simple answers. But so many do NOT.

Some of the questions for which I do not have answers just TODAY:

• Is “not eating dinner” a totally acceptable thing once in a while, or does it indicate something is WRONG?
• Does a repeated claim that a child has a headache indicate an actual headache… or is it a bid for attention… or is it a parroting of my own not-infrequent headaches and therefore a cautionary tale against complaining too much about my own minor aches and pains… or is it a way to divert attention away from the not-eating?
• And if there IS a headache, is it a normal Everyone-Gets-Headaches-Sometimes headache or does it indicate something is WRONG? And how do you know the difference?
• How in the world do I stopper the effervescent frustration of Slow Child Not Moving Quickly Enough When We Need to Get to School on Time FOR THE LOVE before I burst forth with a Mean Mom snarl of PUT YOUR COAT ON OMG?
• If there is no fever, and no REAL reason to keep a child home – especially when everyone seems to think that a snow day or two is imminent this week, based on predicted temperatures – is it really okay to send her to school? Even though this guilty feeling keeps nagging me like a staticky sock stuck to a pant leg?

This is not to mention all of the day-to-day questions I have, including but not limited to:

• How much screen time is REALLY acceptable? And if my kid squeezes it all into the weekends, does that make it better or worse?
• How am I ever going to get her to tie her shoes? I don’t want to buy shoes with laces until she knows how to tie them; cod knows I’m not going to tie them for her. But how is she going to learn until I buy her shoes with laces? DILEMMA.
• Should we be FaceTime-ing with relatives more often?
• Is my kid’s behavior around other adults totally typical of her age, or something I need to be more on top of correcting? (Things like not answering when being spoken to, sticking out her tongue or otherwise being playful, ignoring them totally and wandering off…)
• Am I preparing her well enough for Real Life? While still allowing her to enjoy the freedom and innocence of childhood?
• Is she really going to lose ALL her teeth? And how am I going to handle the horror that is a piece of my child’s bone hanging by a slim bloody tether from her gums MORE TIMES?
• Do I read to her enough?
• Do I play with her enough?
• Does she have enough time to play?
• How many stuffed animals are too many stuffed animals?
• Are my expectations too high? Not high enough?
• Am I giving her enough intellectual stimulation? Social? Physical? Creative?
• Am I teaching her good eating habits?
• Am I a good enough role model?
• Is she getting enough sleep?
• Is she happy?
• How many ways am I failing her?

I don’t know if you are aware, but this parenting thing is EXHAUSTING. It’s like taking a midterm exam every single DAY and knowing that you haven’t studied enough and you are pretty iffy on big chunks of the material. But you don’t get a grade now  – oh no, you have to take 4,560 more exams just between now and when your kid presumably heads off to college. And they’re really important but there’s no way to know if you’re just squeaking by with a C average or totally bombing. That’s the hardest part, right? I could be TOTALLY SCREWING HER UP and I won’t know until she’s an adult.

I am going to go treat this bout of parenting angst with some melted cheese and maybe consider a nap. How’s that for being a role model, hmm?

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A Touch of Melancholy

I have been feeling a little melancholy the past few days. I think I’ve pinpointed some of the sources: It’s that odd time of year, between holidays, where I am sad and exhausted after my full-of-family house emptied out, and the pressure of All Things Christmas is already hot and heavy. I have been rewatching The Closer, which is one of my favorite television shows, but I had forgotten how dreadfully stressful and sad the final season is. I haven’t been writing (paid work and then company/Thanksgiving), which always makes me feel unsettled and off. I read a well-written and deeply sad article in The New Yorker about dementia that hasn’t left me. My husband and I are going to see a lawyer to (FINALLY) do our estate planning. And, of course, the clouds have settled in for what promises to be many months.

It all adds up to feeling extra sensitive to silly things – a probably offhand but seemingly poignant comment from the checker at the grocery store; the way Brenda’s team is so loyal to her on The Closer; having to throw away gobs of carefully, lovingly made Thanksgiving leftovers that no one will eat; that sort of thing – and feeling a little mopey and down.

One of the other sources of my broodiness is a current heightened awareness of the juggernaut of time.

The retail sector is at least partially to blame, I think. All the frenzied emails about Christmas began what feels like months ago and have only increased in intensity. I get anxious just checking my email – all those companies yelling at me to hurry! Going fast! Don’t wait to get in on this! Shop more, save more! Ends tonight! Extended! Don’t miss out! Such a ceaseless cacophony of urgency that I am somehow unable to ignore.

Hanukkah is early this year, which makes me feel like I’m already behind.

My parents were looking at retirement homes when they were here for Thanksgiving. While I am grateful to them for preparing for their old age, and for being so open and frank about the subjects of aging and infirmity and death, it makes me sad and panicky. I may be nearly middle-aged, but I still feel like I’m somewhere in the big swirl of age twenty-to-thirty, and I’m not ready to think seriously about my parents being old.

As I literally just mentioned, I am rapidly approaching middle age, with its attendant anxieties. My skin has frequent eruptions of pique. I vacillate between feeling delighted about my middle-age invisibility and feeling angry about the fact that my husband grows increasingly attractive while I do the opposite and feeling depressed that I am fading into the wallpaper and winding inexorably toward death.

Plus – and, although it may seem like the least important item on my list, it is not– my child has her first loose tooth. As with so many childhood milestones, this feels remarkable and significant. Her little face will change so much once she loses teeth. Teeth she’s had since she was a BABY. And I’m suddenly hyper-aware that she’s five-and-a-half, which is almost six. And while five felt So Big – kindergarten!!!! – six seems practically ancient. This loose tooth has me all in a tizzy of Childhood Is Fleeting and I am simultaneously frantic about making Christmas Special While She Still Gets So Excited About Everything and mooning over all the times I failed to Cherish Every Moment. And now her babyhood is really and truly GONE. She’s practically a GROWN UP.

Of course her growing up is tied inextricably to my own mortality. It all comes down to this: This feeling that I want to keep my baby little – even while I love, LOVE how she is growing. The knowledge that it’s impossible to do so. The desperate need to take in everything – soak up every little bit of her – all the time, and watching as the moment steamrolls past even as I grasp for it.

Last night, I went in to her room to take her to the bathroom before I went to sleep. Usually, she climbs out of bed – she’s really getting too big for me to carry – but this time, I picked her up. She turned her little face up to mine for a kiss, and then draped herself over my shoulder. I stood there for a moment, just holding her. The weight of her in my arms. The warmth of her body, the baking-bread scent of her skin, the gentle sound of her sucking her thumb. Just a minute ago, she was small enough to fit in the curve of my neck. Now, her long legs dangle down to my knees. My big girl. My baby.

Well. Melancholy.

There’s a fresh layer of snow on all the trees, and a steady soft flurry. I got a bright assortment of bell peppers from the grocery store yesterday – the bright green and yellow and orange and red are a nice contrast to the grey. I’ve gotten my meager “fall” décor put away, but am allowing myself a few days before I put out the Christmas stuff; there’s no hurry, and I want to stave off that closed-in feeling I get after too many weeks of Christmas Everything Everywhere I Turn. But because I am a woman of contradictions, I put on a Christmas music station – and Mariah Carey and Tony Bennett and Wham! have done a lot to help chip away at the glum. I have coffee planned with a lovely friend. Just now, I have answered the door to find a beautiful wreath from my mother – it smells like Christmastime and is now hanging proudly on my door. It all helps.

So too does the knowledge that this feeling shall pass, and the hope that maybe someday I will be able to enjoy the present moment without mourning its eventual passage.

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