Yesterday saw the big day for Alex, who actually turns seven today. We had nine small kids running in and out of the house for a few hours, it was delightful, including the noise.
I had a couple of bright ideas for the party on Thursday and Friday. One of those was to make an ice-cream cake. A "Big Green Ugly Monster Cake", to be precise. I decided to make it blue, because I don't like green and the colour theme for the party was Spiderman (red and blue); green would have clashed. Don't know why I thought that would make a difference as most of the presents were Ben-10 and thus fluorescent green and black, but never mind.
Anyway, the "Big Blue Ugly Monster Cake" did not look like a smooth mound of cake as it did in the recipe book, rather it looked like someone had sneezed. Blue. And then its face fell off in the freezer. Then its teeth got covered in blue ice cream. I was so pleased with myself while I was making it. I made FIVE KINDS OF JELLY!!!!! while the meringue for the monster was cooking and was bouncing off walls myself. Good fun cooking.
I was worried a bit - but then I also made cupcakes and did little dragonflies on the top using white chocolate bits for the body and cut-up freckles for the wings. They looked awesome, so I think made up for blue-sneeze-as-if-a-three-year-old-had-been-at-it monster. The kids ate it, so happy day, who cares what it looked like. Plus I got a good chortle out of just how bad it looked.
The other bright idea, and this really was genius although damaged the budget rather severely, was to get ourselves a blow-up jumping castle. That was the hit of the day. Alex got up in the morning, saw Dad setting it up and was nearly beside himself, jumped in it happily for about an hour. When the other kids arrived it was part of an involved chase sequence where you went: jump on castle (plus or minus attacking anyone in there), leap out, stream around the backyard, in either of the back doors, run through the kitchen (and collide, more often than not), in to the lounge room or Alex's room, then reverse. Scream and or yell not optional from what I could gather. Hilarious.
Of course the screaming only happened for the first half-hour or so, then they ran out of puff and got a bit quieter. I had thought of games like pass-the-parcel, but we barely had time for cake at the rate we were going.
Unfortunately I forgot the five kinds of jelly until there were only three kids left, so they had a pile of it (we still have two untouched bowls of it).
Then last night, everything cleaned up, daiquiri in hand, Alex watched Night at the Museum 2 (he had a non-alcoholic daiquiri), I read my book and husbandly pottered around somewhere (he also put out some washing), I had this wonderful feeling of "This is how normal people live". On Saturday nights either I have woken up at about four p.m., am still half awake and have to get ready for work again or I am at work doing an evening shift.
Time to move on, ay-wot? Well at least get a better roster.......
