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”˜Tis the time of summer. Lots of people have birthdays in the summer. I think most of them are first or only children because after a mother’s had one third trimester during the hottest part of the year, she likely learns to… ahem… time things a little better the next time around.

Anywho, many of you are likely planning birthday parties for your small comrades and I think the rest of us should help you out. Today is a day of tips. I will describe 2 birthday parties and invite you to share your ideas too.

1. Faerie Mania — This was a spring party for us but I think it could have been even more funnerer in the summer. Laylee only invited 4 friends because she was turning 4 and also to limit the intake of stuff into our house. The girls were asked to come dressed up in faerie clothes (Princess attire would do in a pinch.). As they arrived, I put wings on those who were unwinged and took their pictures in front of this startlingly realistic woodland backdrop. I read them a book of faerie “FACTS” and crossed my fingers that their parents weren’t anti-Santa-Claus-ites who would take exception to their mythical indoctrination. Faeries are most likely to be found in forests or living in flowers. Each flower is home to a faerie. If you look really hard, you can see them. If you can’t see them, you’re not looking hard enough or are possibly a very naughty little girl who needs to stop picking on her little brother and start brushing her molars more vigorously.
We then printed out their faerie pictures, pasted them onto foam frames and let the girls decorate them with glitter. If the glitter got on their hands, clothes, or up their nostrils, we applauded them for their new improved glittery faerie-like appearances.

We hunted for “faerie money” which was actually stale chocolate coins with menorahs and Hebrew words on them, clearance priced as a post-Hanukah special. Luckily none of the girls could read Hebrew.

The girls planted faerie garden seeds in paper cups and used twigs and branches from the back yard to build small camouflaged houses for lazy faerie squatters to inhabit.

We made them curly ribbon crowns.

No gift bags were given but the girls went home with Hanukah coins, glittery self-portraits, cups of dirt, bundles of yard waste, gift wrapped noggins and imaginations filled with impossible stories. They rejoiced. The entire party cost $30 including food and very little prep time.

Click here for more great faerie party ideas.

2. Magoo’s Fantasy Fire Station Extravaganza — I like my new neighbors for many reasons but mostly because they invited us to their son’s birthday party this weekend and it almost made Magoo’s head explode… in a good way.

The theme was fire trucks.

The party began with a tour of the fire station, which contains FIRE TRUCKS!!!!!, FIRE BOATS, and MO MO FIRE TRUCKS!!!!!!

All the kids got cheap plastic fire hats, which Magoo held onto with both hands. This was smart thinking because it threatened to fall off every time he would get a glimpse of a MO MO FIRE TRUCK, gasp, tremble with maniacal ecstasy, and YELL.

The tour included a chance to walk through an ambulance and the cab of a fire engine. A fire fighter even put on all his gear and shook the kids’ hands while talking like Darth Vader through his helmet. Each child was given a station trading card with a picture of a FIRE TRUCK!!!

I won’t even start to describe the spread of food that followed back at the ranch because I don’t want you all stalking my neighbor and therefore coming a little too close to stalking me but let’s just say it was amazing.

If I were in charge of the party, there would be the station, chips and dogs back at my place and possibly some sort of activity involving a race to see if the kids could stop drop and roll before I sprayed them down with the hose or extinguisher. Good times.

How would you party this summer?

1. The cleanliness of my car in no way determines its ability to smell like poop. I could take a brand new car off the lot and if I put my kids inside, within 10 minutes the new car smell will be changed to something more… natural.

2. Every time I walk into my bedroom, an angel gets his wings. The tiny little metal pieces on my bedside lamp jiggle and tinkle as I walk across the floor and I smile.

3. I didn’t care much that Laylee’s bedroom door locked from the inside with a keyhole on the outside for which I had no key, until she locked it for the first time.

4. Shannon once told me that my northern accent gives me street cred.

5. Even if I didn’t want kids, I may have had them anyway just so I could drive in the HOV lane.

6. The first time Laylee had the stomach flu, I brought her a barf bucket and said, “If ye’re gonna spew, spew into this.” She was not amused.

7. Once I rented a video of housekeeping tips by Heloise. She can make her bed with her legs before she even gets out of it in the morning. Dan and I have been trying to master this skill for years. We call it “Heloising” the bed.

These random facts brought to you by Beth.

Dan and I have been going to occasional marriage therapy for the last year. It started with post partum Issues I was having and continues from time to time because it’s just so darn much fun to find a babysitter and sit in a room with Dan and a practical stranger who happens to be prodding us along to talk about our deepest feelings and most personal insecurities.

Sometimes we go in with troubles to talk about and sometimes we find things we’re troubled about because we’re sitting in a room talking about all the reasons we might be troubled and we think, “Hey! Didn’t you eat the last pack of pink YOGOS?!”

Yesterday was fun because I was being a brat. “I think it’s really insensitive that you didn’t notice me tossing and turning last night because you were asleep. I obviously need a new pillow and you did nothing about it.”

Dan got a funny look on his face and said, “I have a present for you out in the car.” Hmmm.

I guess I’ve talked about the Wonder Pillow at Costco one or fifty times in the last few months so Dan had purchased it for me and was hiding it away in the trunk of his car for the next occasion to present itself. Consider an occasion presented.

The therapist waved at us through the window as Dan pulled out the surprise. Point — husband.

It’s okay. I was a winner too. I got a good night’s sleep and during the session I made a wisecrack that caused our therapist to laugh so hard he almost stopped breathing. That has to count for something.

Oh, and I got to take Dan home with me and keep him. Mmmmmm.

Laylee wants fresh water for her dandelion flower. She NEEDS clear water for her dandelion flower. The dirty water in the kiddy pool out back is completely and not even a little bit not unsuitable for the growth and well-being of dandelion flowers. Dandelion flowers must never never touch dirt.

I told her that flowers live in dirt. They love dirt. Anyway, we could just pressure wash the dandelion flowers if they get too dirty.

She is busy saving worms from being squished by the rocks under which they live. Magoo is busy taking those rocks and throwing them at the worms who have just been saved. But I’m not worried about the rocks that he’s got. He’s still, he’s still Magooly from the block.

The other night at dinner Laylee told Magoo, “You are ODD.” She then looked at me like she was gonna be in huge trouble and added, “and I CARE about you.”

At bedtime every night Laylee invents a new song which she sings in an almost silent vibrato for several minutes. Then she asks Dan and I to sing it back to her. We sing some words, making them up as we go along and she applauds our efforts.

My sister Meg thinks we sound like these guys. (Be sure to listen to This Book is So Awesome and Save Ginny Weasley. Their tour schedule is on the site and many of the concerts are free. You should go check them out if they’re coming your way. And their little friends too, particularly My Dad is Rich.)

Driving through at the bank Laylee asked me, “Where is this place?” I told her it was the bank. “This is not the bank,” she said, “This is McDonalds.”

It’s sort of like McDonalds only instead of a green plastic toy, I get a green paper stack in my “happy meal.”

Magoo recently turned 2 and I honestly feel that there’s nothing terrible about him.

He loves blankets ferociously and sleeps with 6 or 8 tucked around him like a little nest. He still has fat in all the right squidging places but is stretching upwards so that he’s beginning to look like a Real Boy.

I have a hard time recognizing him without food on his face and I’m sure he finds me similarly unidentifiable without matching food on my shoulder. He loves hugs. It’s one of his many chants. “A hug, a hug, a hug, A HUG!!!!” The others include but are not limited to:

Mo mo cheece! (more more cheese — it doesn’t matter if his last cheese was 5 minutes or 5 weeks ago, he always begins the discussion as though he had just swallowed his latest bite.)
Wook, wook, wook, wook! (LOOK!)
My BAKE-IT! (blanket)
and
I got it!

Yeah, he’s got it.

He is often very concerned and has highly expressive eyebrows.

His head precedes his feet by at least a foot when he’s running. He is always running. Unless he’s falling down.

He wants to mosh with life. He wants to experience everything.

He loves his sister greatly. He may love airplanes more. He still prays for shoes several times a day. He begs to use the potty but never goes. He uses his head to catch his fall, afraid of damaging his hands.

Hands are for scooping peanut butter and for smearing… various things.

Each night at bedtime he makes an inventory of his various visible body parts and will not sleep until all of them have been solemnly kiss-ed.

Throughout the day, he peeks behind couches, boxes and piles of laundry, looking and asking for Daddy, sure he’ll pop up at any moment and mourning his absence.

He can eat more than Dan.

He feels things more deeply than me and cries when Laylee is sad.

He is a tender little man, growing up too quickly. I felt a sweetness about him before he was ever born but I never imagined how my soul would light up every time I saw his little round face and chubby knuckles.

I know that even when all the baby fat has melted away, I’ll always be able to look into his blue eyes and see my little buddy.

Sometimes I like to play a game called “If I Were A Rodent, Where Would I Build A Nest For My Babies?” This game gets boring because the answer is always the same — out in the bamboo pile in the corner of the Daring Yard, where the garden is supposed to be.

I keep telling Dan this and he laughs and tousles my hair. “No vermin are building a summer home in our… vermin summer home.”

So, this weekend when I went to clear the pile and plant a garden, I asked Dan to first take a pitchfork and ram and twist it around in Hotel Rodentia. He swore he did this but I happen to know he doesn’t even own a pitchfork.

Today when I went to move the bamboo, I saw several worms crawl away and then a couple of tiny grey blobs with snouts and large pink feet waved at me from under a leaf! I am a rodent-phobe. I have been known to shake and cry after seeing a dead mouse within a mile of my house because a dead mouse within a mile of my house meant that a living mouse could be living under my bed and eating my brains through my ears one bite at a time while I slept.

I started to have a panic attack at the sight of these mutants but for the sake of my children, I did some breathing and positive self-talk, scooped them up onto my shovel, let the kids look at the “cute, cute adorable wittle mousies,” and then hucked them over the fence into forest.

Laylee was crushed. She said they were her pets, that she loved them and she made me promise not to throw any more into the forest so that they wouldn’t get stomped by a Bambi-deer or eaten by a tiger.

She befriended many other beasties today. A week ago she wouldn’t touch dirt without gloves on. Today she was scooping up piles of slimy worms and sorting them into family groups. She told me how much she liked helping “udders” and saving the worms by laying them out flat on the dry hot deck with their new parents and siblings to happily become worm-jerky. I gently explained that they might like it better in a bucket with water and dirt so now each family of worms is in a different cup of dirt, scattered around the yard where Magoo can never never find them.

She even brought me a slug in a cup. “He is my friend. I like him. I put him in this bucket so he can have everlasting life. That means he lives forever.”

After the rodent incident (Wikipedia thinks they’re moles), I continued to clear and rake and plant until we had a nice little garden of dirt out back. Laylee helped water the garden and then stuck the spray nozzle in my running shoe until it was completely saturated while I changed laundry loads. “I wasn’t trying to get your shoe wet. I was trying to get the ground under it wet and it must have gotten in the way.” Ya-huh? Would you like help unwedging the nozzle?

When Dan got home, she told him about ALL the pets, including the future moles we are bound to find if we ever clear out the rest of that bamboo. “Mom is not throwing any more into the forest because they are very tender to ME. They are my pets and I love them.”

Today I found broken glass, a rusty screwdriver, a board with protruding nails and a large leg bone* behind the bamboo in our backyard. It took a few minutes for the creepy music to die down and then I calmed myself with the thought that someone in the neighborhood would have told me if a 3-foot-tall, weight-lifting midget had been murdered in my back yard. Now I’m wondering if Mother Hubbard is taking donations.

A few nights ago I dared Dan to call Korea and he said, “I don’t even know how to call Korea.”

So I googled “CALL KOREA” and voila, he had no choice. Heads up — server administrators in Korea who are hosting illegal phishing websites will pretend not to speak English. And then they will hang up on you, even if you’re the cutest boy. But it will be okay because your wife will still be proud of you for taking a dare and trying to save the world.

Today Laylee told Grammy that when Uncle Adam’s baby is born, we’ll know whether or not it’s a girl because if it’s a girl, it’ll wear a dress to church. Duh! I say we just abolish ultrasounds as a means of determining gender and we certainly won’t be needing THESE THINGS.

Dan let the kids drink the “corn water” from the Niblets can. This is apparently a delicacy in some households.

Being both a geek and a mom, I helped build a bridge.

Magoo colored his face with an orange marker.

Laylee held a worm with gloves on. (Laylee wore the gloves. The worm didn’t have any hands.)

Oprah made me cry.

Eve made me lunch.

You can fit 4 snails into the pocket of a pair of 4T capri pants. Coincidence? I think not.

*Updated – Dan thought I should mention that I took the bone picture late at night with my camera flash. My back yard is huge and unlit so I stumbled along the fence in my crocks, taking a picture every few feet and checking to see if I’d captured the body part yet. It only took me 4 tries to get this fabulous shot. And I didn’t even step on any rusty nails in the process.

Have you ever thrown a baby? Me neither, but my cousins do it all the time at family reunions and it freaks me out. I have thrown multiple baby showers so a friend who’s about to throw their first shower recently asked me for help and ideas.

So, here are the basic steps of a shower:

1. Compile a guest list — Invite people you and the mother-to-be will actually enjoy spending time with. I honestly don’t think the promise of more gifts is worth inviting the annoying coworker who spends a good portion of her time making fat jokes behind your pregnant friend’s back and taking bites out of her sandwich in the lunchroom. If the shower is not a surprise, definitely get the list directly from the showeree.

2. Pick a date — Call the most important guests in advance and find a date when you’re sure they’ll be able to come. I’ve had to reschedule showers in the past because we planned everything, invited the guests and NO ONE could make it on that date. Ask around first.

3. Choose a location — Personally if I’m hosting a shower, I like to do it at my home, as long as the guest list is small enough. I don’t believe you should ever have to pay for the location to host a baby shower. If your guest list is truly huge, make friends with a millionaire and host it at their house.

4. Invite guests — I’ve done everything from hand-delivered homemade cards to mailed invitations to e-vites. Personally I like the mailed invitations the best. It’s just fun to get some good mail every once in a while. It’s also a fun keepsake for the baby book. In addition, I like to send out an evite as a reminder and to keep track of RSVPs.

5. Plan some activities — There’s a big debate in the baby shower world over games, activities and favors. You’re not in on this hotbed of violent discussion? Count yourself lucky. I’ve been to showers with no fewer than 10 games, showers where the game-nazi host literally yells at everyone to stop talking every time some spontaneous fun is initiated because it’s time to start the next game. This gets obnoxious. I tend to be of the “less is more” camp when it comes to planning every second of the shower.

A game or two really does help to break the ice, especially when you’ve got a group of people who don’t know each other very well. Have a couple of emergency activities up your sleeve in case the conversation doesn’t seem to be going well, but if people are having fun on their own, let em go and don’t be offended that you didn’t make it through your whole agenda.

As for party favors, I could take them or leave them but I do think there should be little presents for the winners if you have a game. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

6. Organize food — Regardless of what time of day you have the shower, you’re gonna need to feed these ladies. Your choices range anywhere from a bowl of dried prunes thrown out on the table (very good for regularity) to a full catered meal. I tend to opt for small finger foods, something sweet (Mini brownie bites with a dab of whip cream and a raspberry on top are nice.), something salty (I tend to go with a fabulous and easy crustless quiche recipe I have that’s always a hit.), some fruit (A fruit tray can be really spiced up with a nice dip. One of the best dips I know is just a small jar of marshmallow cream whipped with a tub of strawberry cream cheese. Delicious!), and maybe a veggie tray. If you plan to go the luncheon route, croissant sandwiches are always a good option combined with a simple salad and dessert. For drinks I nearly always go all out and add sliced lemon to ice water. (I know. Oooo and Awww!)

7. Get Decorations — Now again, I say go easy. My favorite baby shower decoration is a rope with cute little baby clothes clipped on with clothespins. Place this across the mantle or some other prominent place, put a few bunches of helium balloons in strategic places and a simple tablecloth on the table and you’re good. If you want to go the extra mile, buy a bouquet of brightly colored fresh flowers to put on the food table, along with some white candles. You can use really inexpensive white plates, napkins and cutlery, no need to get all cutesy with the baby-face-engraved Chinette.

8. Party Party Party

Lastly I’d like to share a couple of games that can be fun.

-One of my favorites may be sick and wrong if you think too hard about it but it’s always been a hit. You buy tiny plastic babies from a party supply store and then freeze them in ice cubes. Once everyone’s arrived, explain that whoever’s baby is “born”/unfrozen first, wins the game. This game’s fun because everyone’s getting to know each other while holding their drink and keeping an eye on their baby. Very low maintenance.

-There’s the old standard strip-jars-of-baby-food-naked-and-try-to-guess-what-flavor-they-are game. This has many variations where you can allow the guests to smell, touch or even taste the food. I have found no sanitary or pleasant way to do this last version so I’d advise against it.

-Hand out a quiz as guests are coming in with multiple choice questions about the pregnancy, possible names for the baby and other interesting facts about the mom and baby to be. Whoever gets the most answers right wins. I like to put at least one totally ridiculous answer with each question. People chuckle over it and it gets them talking as they fill in their answers.

Be sure to have someone record the gifts and who they all came from so your guest of honor can write thank you notes.

I’d love your input. What makes a good shower? Do you have any memorable baby shower activities or experiences you’d like to share?

I translate things. Both the little jubs are experimenting with language.

Laylee likes to make up words and then tell me that they are Spanish for “I want a cheese stick” or “Where’s the rubber chicken?” She’ll say, “Spanish for shoes is sav-wato or also peek-oo-lee-toe.” I nod and smile. Sometimes I thank her for the lesson and sometimes I respond with some “Spanish” of my own.

Magoo speaks in a language all his own. It has lots of consonants strung together by grunts and its structure is repetitive in nature. You know how dumb English speakers will sometimes yell at some poor non-English speaker very slowly, hoping that the sheer volume and flying spit of their words will trip something in the person’s brain and they’ll suddenly be blessed with the gift of tongues?

Well, Magoo’s kind of like those people, except he gets progressively faster in his repetition, rather than slower. “Ma-pallow, Ma-pallow, Ma-pallow, Ma-pallow, Ma-pallow, Ma-pallow, Ma-pallow, Ma-pallow, MA-PALLOOOOOOWWWW!!!”

He will not switch to a new word until I have successful guessed the current word. All I have to do is figure out that he is saying “marshmallow,” tell him “no,” comfort him as he buries his face in his hands and howls and he’s good to go.

Another fun game of repetitively seeking to be understood is “WOOK.” This game is played by pointing into the back yard, a crowded room, or a large mound of miscellaneous garbage at the dump and yelling “WOOK, WOOK, WOOK!” while vaguely waving your finger at one specific item the size of a dust mite.

To win this game, the parent needs to identify the object, state its name, show an unreal amount of enthusiasm for said object or simply hit herself over the head with a mallet, forcing buddy Magoo to run off seeking a new, un-limp playmate.

I like the look on Magoo’s face as he hyperventilates dandelion spawn all over our freshly mowed lawn more than I hate the weeds.