Oh, I’m Losing It, All Right!

First things first: I lost 0.6 pounds last week, which puts me under 180 lbs, which is where I wanted to be. Well, if you want to get technical, I weigh 179.6 which would actually be 180 if you were rounding up, but I (and Weight Watchers, incidentally) am not, so there.

So, whew, that’s just over 7 down, 15 more to go until I get to my goal. Yay, me!

But speaking of Losing It, can we talk about my daughter’s eighth birthday party yesterday? I should tell you first off that it was a great success, in that all the kids had a great time. Yay, me!

I’d love to post some pictures of the party, but I seem to have lost! (OMG, NO!) my camera’s USB cable. I have one that looks right, but just doesn’t fit. And when I looked for a logo or brand name on it somewhere, all I found was "28AWG SPACE SHUTTLE" written all over it. Space Shuttle? Is it just me, or is that a weird phrase to find on a USB cable?

That being said, however: Oh. My. God. Fourteen kids for two-and-a-half hours is a GARGANTUAN undertaking. Now I know, I know — I used to be a teacher. I regularly managed classes of 30+ kids with no trouble (or mostly no trouble, anyway). But put them in your home, add cake and juice and chips and string the letters P-A-R-T and Y together and it spells TROUBLE (well, we both know very well it spells ‘party’, but you know what I’m getting at).

Once the whole thing was over I literally collapsed into a chair and ate leftover Hallowe’en candy for dinner. Honestly, the Hubster and I were asleep – ASLEEP! – at 9:30 pm, and that’s after switching back to standard time!

Oh, and you should know that we didn’t even do the whole darn party. We had a magician for the first hour or so. Although even that was stressful because two of the guests were significantly (as in more than 30 minutes) late, so I asked the magician to wait a bit to start, but he was impatient to get going, so we started without 2 of the guests. So I had to keep listening for the doorbell and running off upstairs to collect the tardy ones. And one of the little tykes kept calling out after every trick the magician did, saying, "I know how you did that!" And even though she didn’t, it still seemed to faze him a little bit, and he’d give this nervous giggle and everyone felt awkward. Personally I was silently rooting for him to retort, "you do? Well come on up here and show the other kids…I bet they’d love to learn how to do a magic trick!" But to his great credit he didn’t, and in the end, I just put my hand on her head gently and said, "let’s just watch the show and enjoy it," because I’ve known her since she was in diapers and I really do love this little girl, just not at that moment. No, not at that moment.

And then there were the games: freeze dance and soccer and four-kids-on-the-trampoline (yes, that dangerous game that kids love and orthopedic surgeons hate) and the noise, oh the noise, oh the noise, noise, noise, NOISE! (She says in her best Grinchy voice.) Another little girl whom I’ve known for years and whom I also dearly love, well, she was so darn loud that I nearly clamped my hand over her mouth. It’s just that she wanted to talk to me all the time. She had to give me a running commentary on what all the other guests were doing, with frequent inquiries as to whether their specific activities were permitted or forbidden (forbidden; I think she secretly hoped). She also wanted to RUN THE PARTY. "Can I press the button for the music for freeze dance? Can I tie on the blindfolds and say go for the games? Can I tell the other kids when it’s time for cake? Can I hand out the presents?" How about this kiddo: can you keep your mouth shut for more than a nanosecond? But of course, I didn’t say that out loud, either. No I did not. I calmly breathed and doled her out some responsibility to let her know I heard her, and asked her, very nicely, not to scream please, because it might frighten the guinea pig.

And then my daughter — paragon of ungratefulness as all eight-year olds are at their own birthday parties — had to be forcibly reminded to thank her guests for coming and for their lovely gifts. Thirteen reminders to put the presents down now and say thank-you to your guest. Thirteen! You’d think she might have picked it up after the second or third or oh, let’s say TENTH! reminder. Sheesh…talk about being a proud parent.

And you just know that one of the parents was 15 minutes late, and then the
guest ran off and hid and the parents were all: ‘hee hee, isn’t that
cute…she wants to stay’ and I was all: ‘get your f***ing kid out of
my f***ing house now!’ only I didn’t say it out loud.

Oh! And then there was the guest who tried to walk out with one of my daughter’s presents – the bat Webkinz, no less. That was a fun one!

And one of the moms congratulated me on having the party at our house, because she so dislikes how all birthday parties these days seem to be big events planned elsewhere. And I felt like such a freakin’ hero. And I’m ready to put down a deposit on next year’s party: anywhere but here!