Post Birthday

I’m warming up for an especially manic post break Monday with a little blog post. Imagine this scene from yesterday morning. Saturday’s insane combo of ethnomusicology conference, kid birthday party at ACAC, and preschool wine tasting fundraiser left me hung over. Thanks to the rudeness of Daylight savings time I simply was not able to take the big kids to Sunday school and Manuel graciously agreed to do singing and bonding while I stayed home with Eli clutching my coffee. Eventually I went upstairs for approximately three minutes to accomplish this to put on running clothes. When I came downstairs there was little Eli covered in frosting, literally from the top of his head to his foot with a very blue face and red hands. I looked at him in disbelief and without missing a beat the kid said “I was hungwy” In my three minutes upstairs he had ingeniously gotten a stool sat on the counter wrestled the plastic off of the giant SAMS club cake from the birthday party and with a kid sized fork managed to scrape the frosting off of about half the cake. I’m not exaggerating; he didn’t eat much for the rest of the day and is till not entirely his regular color. For a kid who sleeps in a crib and has no interest in the potty he’s getting frighteningly independent. He made himself a peanut butter sandwich the other day and yesterday decided he needed to find Manuel’s tool box so that he could fix something in his toy kitchen.

Meanwhile I think the seventh birthday has finally come to an end. Rebecca has made at 17 bags with her sewing machine and Manuel and Jonathan are still working on the Star Wars arc170 with it’s 763 lego pieces. I felt like having their party at the ACAC indoor playground from hell further sealed my fate as not mother of the year. But for the record the kids LOVED it, it’s cheaper than the clever things I’ve done at home, and there was no cleanup. Ok it’s true that before we even left the driveway I had to call my friend Liz and inform her that two out of three kids were tantruming and one husband was having the 46 year old versions of a tantrum. (Neither my family nor Liz’s ever gets through a party without tears as far as I can tell) And it’s also true that the noise level left me needing to take more advil than the bottle recommends. And the kids all ate pieces of processed Sam’s club cake the size of their heads. (One child whose mother pretty much outlaws processed sugar looked completely green after the cake and we had a little cuddle before I let her back on the equipment) And my idea that we take the other three kids who live on the block to spare their parents the delicious feeling of the indoor playground did make for a rather loud van ride—four boys aged 6-8, a diva with an impressive set of pipes, and a three year old who echoes everything can make quite the racket. My favorite part of the van ride was the one kid who goes to private school teaching the other kids the lovely song “boys go to college to get more knowledge girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” Manuel nipped it in the bud by asking what do you need to be an astronaut to which my feminist daughter replied “my mommmy and your mommy both have PhD’s and you’re wrong wrong wrong”

In any case yesterday was a slow day on the home front. Somehow the ten mile run took most of the day, perhaps because of the long bath it required. I run with four other women and am pleased to say that despite a dearth of long runs resulting from the snow, a variety of illnesses, and two completed book manuscripts (not mine) we did in fact run the ten miles and should finish the miler with some decency. When we were younger and fresher and our children were cuter and more loving Anna’s son dubbed us the “pretty running ladies.” The afternoon recovery involved for me somehow finding myself in the middle of some star wars prisoner game in which I told the five kids wielding sticks that they could put me in prison if they cleaned up. Oddly enough they did.