Nell received so much craft stuff for her birthday that our house is now covered in glitter, stickers, googly eyes and tiny, tiny pieces of plastic. Her grasp of origami is slightly lacking (probably my fault) because she seems to use a lot of sticky tape to get the shape she's aiming for, but her creativity is unsurpassed.
Friday last week was a day of shopping, cleaning and preparing. I was so exhausted that by 5pm I was prone on the couch, believing that I would not have the energy to finish the day. Fortunately the kids started whining at me for food and I cooked a giant pot of spaghetti which made all of us feel a whole lot better (huh, food gives you energy - who knew?) and I managed to wrangle them into bed before I lost consciousness.
But before I settled down to finish my book, I discovered that our kitchen sink had a crack in the bottom of it, leading to flooding of the cupboard and floors beneath. I've always hated this sink, to tell the truth, because it is a giant porcelain (I think 'French Country Kitchen' is the correct descriptor) square tub whose corners are ever so slightly lower than the waste. So yucky water collects in the corners. But I wasn't exactly thrilled to have it fail when I was otherwise occupied. And tired.
Although I like to think of myself as somewhat competent, I have to admit that I was sort of relying on Soy arriving home at around 8am to pitch in for the party, with moral support if nothing else. I was slightly devastated, then, to receive a phone call at 8 telling me that he was still in the air and expected to arrive just before 11. Around the same time the guests did.
At times like that, the only thing to say is "thank God for mothers-in-law". Soy's mother Helen arrived at 9 bearing spanakopita and pecan pie both the most delicious (and nutritious) things on offer to guests. She then whipped up the loaf of butterfly shaped fairy bread while I turned a packet of muffins into mini pizzas and burned a whole pot of popcorn.
Nell chose her favourite pink dress and focused on the sparkle-ponyness of the day. When Soy did finally arrive, travel weary and bearing cans of chicken flavoured milk (I don't know either), he turned barista and began cranking out espressos for the rapidly assembling throng.
The congregation of four, five and six year olds seemed to enjoy the musical statues and pass-the-parcel, the tiny ones played happily with the gold fish and bike streamers. Some sort of beauty salon was set up behind a pot plant and a lot of lip gloss was applied to four-year-old eye brows. I don't know, but they seemed to enjoy it.
As I said in my last post, I collapsed so crumpled at the end of the day that I immediately came down with sinusitis, which is my natural reaction to over excitement. Nell has a more measured response which was to cover our house from top to bottom in tiny cut out stickers and spiders made from pipe cleaners.
Now that Nell is actually four, I have to keep my promise to enroll her in ballet classes but she has also been assigned her first family job. Our house rule is that anyone aged four or over has to pitch in to the running of the household. Her job is to unload the cutlery basket of the dishwasher, a job she inherited from Zac. She has applied herself to the task with alacrity and is now looking for a promotion. Zac is just glad to finally be rid of the cutlery job which he hated with a passion disproportionate to the effort the job required. For some reason loading the kids dishes into the dishwasher is far preferable. Go figure.
Finally, here is a photo of my tiny neice. Really she's not so tiny but she is only 2 and a half months old. Maybe to other people she looks just like a baby but to me she looks like family. I'm sure it's a weird biological imperative that she be familiar to those most likely to care about her. She is just like Lee only smaller, cuter and without the facial hair and tattoos. She's already got the eyebrows.
