The end of the world as we know it

Throughout May and June, my mind has been taking rather an eschatological bent. No, no, I don't mean the Mayan calendar nonsense (although I firmly believe if the end of the world is predicted often enough, someone's bound to be right). I mean, as the school year draws to a close, so do the events associated with younger daughter's elementary school education. When this happened with elder daughter five years ago, I felt quite a pang, but this time, I feel rather relieved. As usual, I'm rather terrified to be once again stepping out into the unknown, but surely the next school (with a total of twenty students) has to be an improvement on her current school where she consistently falls between the cracks.

Anyway, back to "last things". Last weekend, we threw what we fervently hope was the last theme party for younger daughter. Between both girls, I've given eighteen theme parties. The most nightmarish times were, of course, the years when they overlapped and I spent April and May making lists and buying supplies.

This year, I decided to cheat a little and (kind of) repeat a theme. (I've only done this once before: elder daughter got a Harry Potter party at age eight, and younger daughter had one at age ten.) Five years ago, I gave a "Blast to the Past" party for elder daughter who was then in Grade Six. Her Girl Guide troupe had essayed tie-dying the previous winter, which gave me the courage to hunt down cold dyes, invite thirteen classmates to the house and set them to work on the back deck. It was a breezy day in late April, and their hands were red and raw with the cold, but I was able to send them home with damp shirts in plastic bags with dire warnings written in red about washing the shirts with the family laundry. No parents showed up on my lawn with burning torches and cleaning bills, so I guess it was all right.
This year, however, there were no dyes to be found in Hades. The craft store I had used before has downgraded itself to a drab and depressing home decoration kind of warehouse with shelves and shelves of cheap knick-knacks, and all I had in the basement were two dusty packages of Tintex, one blue and one purple.

I ended up ordering from the Dharma Trading Co.. I gather they are the go-to people for this kind of thing, having been established in 1969 and now operating out of San Rafael, California. You can't get much more hippy-dippy than that. No, really, I mean it. Check out their introduction.

Geez. Well, having terrified myself thoroughly by reading the instructions, I began repeating that well-known mantra from that famous hippy, Eleanor Roosevelt: You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

This is why I spent Saturday morning perspiring through a face mask (provided by the company) while I mixed up urea, the dyes, and a big bucket of soda ash. The Resident Fan Boy chopped up vegetables and decided where to string up balloons which I'd inscribed the night before with various Sixties Slogans.Okay, so we changed a couple.

Elder daughter worked her magic, as she has done in the past, festooning the house with posters and streamers. I particularly loved this Rainbow Door she came up with:She wanted to create a Sixties slide-show for the computer, but ran out of time, particularly when our first guest, the notorious Russian Prodigy who has featured in a couple of my younger-daughter's-school-nightmare rants, showed up nearly half an hour early. R.P. settled into the living room and questioned younger daughter in her usual condescending sweet-as-pie manner. I didn't witness this, but elder daughter, who doesn't know Russian Prodigy, reported that she was soon wishing heartily that R.P. "would just leave". She also reported that R.P. ventured upstairs to our bedroom (which has an "out of bounds" sign) several times in search of our cat, but beat a hasty retreat when she realized the room wasn't empty. Another parent has told me that R.P. believes that I hate her and is terrified of me. Pardon me while I take a break for some diabolical laughter.

Anyway, despite the lost sleep, chewed fingers, uncontrollable screaming at inopportune moments (I'm talking about me, here), the party was all right. No one used the squirt bottles of dye as weapons. No one got an unsightly rash. Two little girls spent snack time discussing other birthday parties, none of which had included younger daughter, but she seemed oblivious, and did not lose her composure once, although she may have snapped at me briefly when I was supervising her with the tie-dying.

The next morning, after an evening binging on leftover tortilla chips, I rose bright and early, and carefully following the instructions, rinsed out 13 tee-shirts, laundered them (twice) in the specially-provided detergent, and tossed them in the dryer. It was rather neat to see each little girl's personality emerging from the rivulets of rinsed-away dye and discarded elastic.


See? They're rather like Rorschach tests, aren't they? Can you guess which little girl is impatient to finish, and which little girl spent more than an hour painstakingly planning her design? Which little girl had done tie-dying before, and which little girl is on the autism spectrum?

Maybe it's safer to test me. There were three tee-shirts left over and tons of dye, so despite my aching feet and bone-weariness, I stumbled out back into the mildly humid evening and quickly did the remaining tees. The first is done by twisting the shirt into a cone, the second (my favourite) by folding the shirt accordion-style then tying it in a knot, and the third by wrapping pebbles and twigs into the shirt and sealing the pockets with a rubber band.

Far out. Well, that's it. No more birthday parties. That way, if the world does indeed end on December 21, 2012, I won't have spent the previous spring in a dither of performance anxiety. Okay, I probably will, but it will be about something else.

Party Rats

My horoscope for this week tells me, rather sagely I think, that it will be an up-and-down week and whatever happens is going to happen. However, we can choose our choice of response. This is where we have control in our lives. I've been getting quite a taste of that already and today's a Full Moon so heaven knows what may happen by day's end. I figure if I'm going to blog on the positive, I better do it now...

I succeeded in surviving younger daughter's party. I planned it. I organized it. I ran it. And I did it while pre-menstrual.
Twelve little girls attended, not including birthday girl. I've taken up the rash policy of inviting all the girls in younger daughter's class, with the idea of skirting little-girl-class-politics. This policy seemed less rash two years ago when there were nine girls in the class. There are now seventeen. So I sent out the rather fiddly invitations two weeks ago and waited for responses, half-terrified that I'd only get two (which did happen three years ago when younger daughter was at her previous school), and even more terrified that all seventeen would accept as we usually only get one refusal per year. This year we got four, one last-minute due to a family emergency. Also three last-minute acceptances accompanied with profuse parental apologies and they'd been so busy... And no one else is? Actually, my favourite was from the single dad (not that this is relevant) who told me he was sure his daughter had passed on the acceptance at school. (To whom? The over-worked teacher who knew nothing of the party? My daughter with her memory challenges? What did he think the phone number and email on the mailed invitation with the letters RSVP were for?)
Anyway. We had a Ratatouille party. With real ratatouille. I found two simple recipes, chopped up the ingredients, bagged them and labelled them "Ratatouille 1" and "Ratatouille 2", divided the girls into teams, and crowded them into the kitchen in our semi-detached, where the team captains were passed the baggies to sauté in two saucepans. We then played a kind of team Pictionary game where they drew collages of song lyrics and had the other teams guess while the stews simmered. The girls did a champion job and we had ratatouille for dinner for two nights. I called the activity "Rate-atouille" and the first recipe won out marginally over the second. I think only half the girls volunteered to taste it; the rest tackled "egg-rats" (which you can see in the bottom of the third picture), veggies and dip, crackers and French cheeses, and of course, totally demolished the various bowls of chips. Fine dining indeed.
We had begun the party decorating cupcakes, and finished it with younger daughter blowing out curlicue candles on the backs of ice cream rats with licorice tails and jelly ears. Then she sat down and opened way too many presents. For some reason, the tradition in this neighbourhood is to give three to five presents in one gift-bag, which I suppose is really looking a gift horse in the mouth, but this meant younger daughter received about thirty gifts. She was getting rather overwhelmed by this point, but held it together admirably, although I had to ramp up the prompting toward the end.

Each girl then politely approached me for her goodie bag, thanked me for inviting her, and departed with the appropriate parent. It's a very courteous neighbourhood (except the drivers). I sat down at the computer and waited for the earliest illegal showing of the latest Doctor Who.

I've been planning theme parties for my girls for the past dozen years. For four or five of those years, the girls overlapped and I had to plan two parties within the space of one month. I sincerely hope next year is the last. I mean, each one is a real learning experience, but it's time for the tee-shirt, doncha think?

Afterthought: Re-reading this, I really come across as an ungracious hostess. The girls were pleasant and cooperative, and the usual little guardian angels took turns guiding younger daughter over the social hurdles. I also forgot to mention that the Resident Fan Boy and elder daughter availed themselves and filled in so many gaps, so I could supervise and take pictures. Do I sound a little less peevish now?