The party went well. We had a 50% "yes" rate on the RSVP's, making a total of 6 kids, including my 3. Not too bad a turnout for Easter weekend -- and everyone there really liked Benjamin. I didn't want to deliberately exclude anyone, but wasn't quite in the mood to invite the entire Kindergarten class. Thanks to Oriental Trading Company we had some nice "bat" party favors, stuffed beanies, key chains and rubber bats. We played a version of Blind Man's Bluff/Marco Polo called Bat and Moth that used echolocation for a blind bat to find a sighted moth -- the rest of the kids got to be "trees." I hid the rubber bats in the living room -- squeeed between pillow cushions, etc. They were dark so they hid pretty well, unlike the eggs we hid on Sunday :)
We played with balloons, had cake with a bat freehanded by me, ice cream, fruit and pizza -- and since we were a smallish group we got the good stuff: Papa John's. They opened presents and we watched "Stellaluna" -- much less a production than I've done in the past. I've put on some pretty elaborate themed parties before involving paper mache and stations and treasure hunts, etc. I liked the calmer feel this time, and the smaller number of kids, even without the "wow" factor. But, since children barely remember parties after a year or so, much nicer to just relax.
And Stanley. If you have ever come across the book "Flat Stanley" you will recognize him as a little boy who was smooshed flat by a blackboard, who was perfectly fine after, but flat as a sheet of paper who has several adventures. Apparently it is a stock second-grader activity these days to send out a "Flat Stanley" doll to a penpal. Jeannine has two, a friend from Texas, and a second-cousin we met at a family reunion who lives in Tenessee -- so within a few days we had not one, but two Flat Stanley visitors that we are to give a tour of the Seattle Area and send back a picture and a note, and the flat Stanley. We haven't made it to the Space Needle yet, but we did stop for chowder at Ivar's Seafood Bar where both Stanleys "Kept Clam" ;)
Well, the mice are gone. David needed to get something from the pool box, so we checked to see if the baby mice were still there. They weren't. Apparently mama mouse decided a box where the food was removed and her babies were knocked out of the nest wasn't that great of a home after all.
Very glad there weren't five baby mouse corpses we were responsible for, at least.
Benjamin is having a "bat" party this Saturday. Yes, just a bat party, not Batman or anything. The kids got interested in them because of a book on CD I chose called "Silverwing" by a man of the last name of Oppel. We're on the sequel now called "Sunwing" -- and it is much darker. In it there is a colony of Mexican free-tailed bats who live under a bridge. I can only imagine they are refering to Austin, which hosts the largest colony of Mexican free-tailed bats in a specially constructed bridge for the purpose. Now bats are being sent to bomb places in South America, and the northern bats who were attached to bombs that didn't explode are trying to make their way North, and the families of those bats who were sent to South America are making their way South. I don't know quite how it will end, but the kids are hooked.
Oh, and my addiction. I watched the latest Episode of Lost -- yes, I admit I watch, but it isn't really an addiction. I wasn't quite ready for the dead character to have died, so I was theorizing a way for him to be alive and looking for a place to post it that didn't require registration to yet another community. Someone at a site called yahooanswers.com happened to ask the question "Is Jin Dead" so I found a great place to post my ideas. I am a yahoo member already so could go ahead. And lo and behold, I found a place where people were asking reference questions and they really wanted to know the answer. The vast majority are not worth responding to -- either they have a political or social agenda or were kids trying you to do their homework for them, but there were some genuine fun to research questions. I loved working at the reference desk, and would answer people's questions for free, and I got a little involved in doing it. They have a ratings system, like Amazon, and the asker choosing you best answer gains you points. I got up to level 2, but had better stop or it will really drain away my time. However, it is fun, and I'm learning. Did you know a South African ratel (aka honey badger) is able to suffer puff adder bites with no harm, and the Ratel is also a South African military vehicle. Anyway, I'd better get off to bed.
I've really meant to post here for the last couple weeks, so this will be a little longish I'm afraid, to make up for lost time. First, I have discovered that my children all find the movie Pinocchio deeply disturbing. Rose wasn't feeling very well the other day and insisted on choosing her own this time, rather than letting me do it. Pinocchio was duly selected and we started it, with giggles as Jimmeny was elected the "conscience" -- now there is a word you don't find yourself writing every day. All went swimmingly until the boy-puppet's first temptation by Honest John and his accomplice. Jimmeny extricated said puppet from the problem, and a collective sigh of relief passed over the children -- but when two minutes later, he got himself embroiled in another situation with the same two individuals when he should have known better, my eight year old had to leave the room and my four year old stood in front of the screen and sobbed. My little boy, now six, was less troubled. So we fast forwarded to the puppet show under the care of Stromboli. Somehow the captivity and imprisonment of Pinocchio wasn't as much an issue. It was only when, after his rescue by the blue fairy and being told that was his final chance to be good, when he fell in again with Honest John and decided to listen again to the bad advice that the sobs redoubled. We fast-forwarded to the land of the little boys who get turned into donkeys and the crying continued, so I removed the film, briefly recounted the ending and we decided on something a little less stressful.
For his school, my son is collecting "Box Tops for Education," and there is a classroom competition. I had only before noticed them on cereal boxes, but no, on further research, one can find them on ziplock bags, cake mixes and even Tampax products. Who knew? Since we tend to by generic, I didn't find all that many in my pantry, but have lately been buying Kix and Cheerios exclusively, so we'll have a few by mid-April, when the drive is over.
We have somewhere in the range of two to seven pets! One is "Baby," who lives in our refrigerator -- a sourdough starter. And one is "Sluggy-Bug," a small black slug who lives in a peanut butter jar, outside. My eldest daughter noted they aren't very exciting, and when I mentioned that we'd probably get a dog sometime -- she said, "No, it's okay, Sluggy-Bug can climb trees with us -- a dog couldn't do that." (They've made a little harness for the peanut butter jar and haul him up with them into the trees) We also discovered a nest of b5 aby mice in our pool/garden box outside. I'd left a bag of birdseed there, and the other day saw a mouse, so David kindly offered to move the bag out and set a trap. However, moving the bag revealed 5 baby, hairless, newborn mice -- so we didn't quite have the heart to set the traps for the mom. Internet research proved that caring for baby mice was quite labor intensive, besides feedings, they need help on an hourly basis to "go potty." Since all of our children are well past that stage, we weren't eager to take it on. So we now have some baby mice on the same basis as Pharoah's daughter had Moses -- we have them, but the real mom is doing all the work. We also removed most of the food, just left the stuff that had spilled out, so not sure if the mom will hang out there, or if they'll survive. However, I don't plan to investigate the situation closely. When they're grown up in a month or so, we'll sweep up the rest of the food and set traps so they don't plan on setting up house.
We received a game for Christmas this year called "Settlers of Catan," and broke it out to play the other night. It has a hexagonal, variable game board that snaps together like a puzzle and can have four players or teams of players. We played it with the older two kids while Rose did something else. Reading children make life so much easier; the number and quality of games you can play as a family rises dramatically. Anyway, the game is vaguely like a mix of risk and monopoly. Instead of money, you collect resources, wool, grain, ore, bricks, or wood, on each turn. Each turn you can turn your resources into roads, settlements, or cities, or a "development card" thereby increasing your chances of getting even more resources next turn. Settlements and Cities, and some of the development cards are worth "Victory Points" -- and when a player reaches 10 of these, the game is over. Each area of the board: pasture, woods, mines, clayfields, farms; yields a resource and has a number on it. If you have a settlement bordering that resource, whenever anyone rolls that number, you get a resource card. There is also a thief, so when anyone rolls a seven, they can steal a resource card from another player. Also, when the thief is deployed, anyone who has more than 7 resource cards has to turn half of them back to the bank -- which encourages you to build, rather than hoard resources. Player to player trading is encouraged as well. We've played twice as a family and it is quite addictive.
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