Pippipalooza 2012: Behind the Party Scenes

Seems like most anyone planning a kid's birthday party these days is getting ideas from Pinterest. So many adorable photos that hint at all the beauty that could be yours -- if only you had the time, talent or treasure to make it so.

But what Pinterest doesn't show you is the truth about how the ideas -- and the party -- really played out.

Motherhood Uncensored recently wrote about how she longs to see the outtakes of what we portray in blogs -- the blooper reel that shows what life really looks like. The truth is that Pippi's birthday party totally stressed me out. My sweet friends tell me it was fun to attend, but for me it felt like swarming chaos. And I was too focused on being sure that all the kids were busy or that Pippi wasn't naked to be able to actually take in the fun.

So here you go. Here's what wasn't so picture perfect about yesterday's party plan post:

Decorations

• Writing on the door was a cute idea until it occurred to me that Pippi and her friends can't read. And almost a week later it's still there because I haven't stopped long enough to clean it off.
• The balloons on the family room floor were fun -- until they started popping and scared all the kids.
• The shimmer wall left glitter all over the fireplace and the girls were all jockeying to admire themselves in the metallic reflection. Not quite what I intended. 
• All of the decorating and craft prep took longer than I thought it would. Not that it was hard or a lot, but just more than I wanted to do on the weekend.
• The cake decorations turned out awesome -- but I spent two hours the night before the party (keeping me up past midnight) trying to find where I had hidden the package of Polly Pockets so that Pippi wouldn't find them before the party. Turns out they were in a bag in my closet. Where I had looked 18,000 times. And after all that, I'm not sure Pippi even noticed -- but at least the cake was tasty.

Crafts

• I bought way too many stickers. Also, the reason they were all on clearance is that they didn't stick very well to anything. Which sort of defeats the purpose of STICKers.
• Glitter glue is just a bad idea. Very bad. Sadly for you, I was too busy containing it to take a photo.
• I didn't unfold the gift bags, so most of the kids thoroughly decorated the flap that turns into the bottom of the bag. Which was then covered in sticky, wet glitter glue. In retrospect, I should have skipped the bag project.
• The rock star photo head project turned out awesome, but it took much longer than we anticipated to take, download, resize, print, cut out and glue down the photos. Yeah, we should have known better. That meant my husband spent all of the craft and dance portions of the party upstairs at the printer while I was left downstairs drafting other moms into service to help me out.
• If you decide to do the maraca project, be sure to tape or gorilla glue the eggs closed. My husband told me we needed to, but I didn't listen -- had visions of 3-year-olds stuck to the table with glue, but instead got dried beans bouncing all over the floor.

Dance activities

• Dressing up went pretty well -- but it probably would have been funnier if we'd helped each kid find a hat, sunglasses and one other item. As it was, I think some kids got costumes and others didn't, but I'm not sure if they were happy about it.
• Before we told them to dress up, I should have been VERY CLEAR with Pippi that we were dressing up OVER our clothes. As one of my sweet friends pointed out, she only saw Pip in her unders three times during the party. Guess I should just be grateful it wasn't more.
• Freeze Dance would have worked better if I hadn't been losing my voice to allergies. I sounded like someone who smoked eight packs a day, so the kids really couldn't hear me yell "freeze."
• The Pass the Jingle Bells game was a total fail. All they wanted was the candy, so no one wanted to pass the bells -- each kid just clutched the bells until the music stopped while the other kids whined about why couldn't they have any candy.
• Should have set aside one song for Pippi to lead the group in a dance (see above photo for her bossy face) -- it would have been hilarious to watch her teach her friends the "sprinkler" (which she learned at her Baptist preschool, by the way) and then let them all join in. Instead, Pippi yelled in the middle of a song that she wanted to sing Twinkle and when everyone finally started listening, she got shy and hid.
• Should have done more group dance type songs, like the hokey pokey or the dancing directions in "Get Up & Go" (The Biscuit Brothers) or "The Stand Up Song" (Big Bang Boom). This would have required me to get over my self-consciousness and lead said dances instead of just telling them all to dance (see photo below), but it would have been worth it.

Lessons learned

• We invited too many friends. I guess this is a good problem to have because I could not think of anyone on the list not to invite -- but it definitely added to the chaos. Ideally, you'd probably only invite five or six kids to a party like this.
• Should have bribed hired some 10- to 14-year-old kids from the neighborhood to help lead activities. Then I could have spread the crafts out around the house a little more and had some help leading the dances.
• A dance party should have more dancing and less crafting. This seems obvious in retrospect, but not so much during the planning phase.
• Should have set out drinks for grown ups on the counter so they could help themselves. Instead, I totally forgot to offer anyone anything until after we'd served cake. Or now that I think about it, maybe it's just that I should have had a drink before the party started. 

So nothing blow-up-melt-down disastrous -- but not something I'll be attempting again anytime soon. Too bad Pippi has already started planning her fifth birthday.

I've created a monster.

Catch up on Pippipalooza 2012:

- It's On

- Preschool Musical
- Such a Big Girl
- The Party Plan
- Blog Post Retrospective

Capture the Everyday: Place Where Things Pile Up

When I saw this week's prompt from Adventuroo, my immediate question was "place"? As in singular? Like I just have one pile and everything else is neatly put away?

Yeah, right.

A couple years ago I wrote about the pile on top of my dresser as an archaeological dig. Thinking of it as a science experiment somehow made me feel better about this mess.

For this post, I just made the circle around my downstairs and found the following ELEVEN gems -- by artsifying them in Instagram, I am somehow less ashamed.

Laundry Room

In theory, the hooks are a good way to organize. In reality, they become a messy catch-all for things that don't belong.

Paint supplies and furniture sliders from the renovation (that we finished in APRIL), plus laundry bags, two sun hats and the corner of a Zappos box for returning the ugly hats.

Kitchen

 The primary counter, which should be for people sitting at the counter stools we haven't bought yet, is covered with mail, cups, purse, lunch boxes and my husband's iPhone.

In the floor area under the counter where we don't have the counter stools we seem to be storing our borrowed card tables (for monthly summer happy hour), two rugs we had to pull out of the attic after the latest leak and a duffle bag and table cloth left over from camping.

This is my lovely kitchen desk area. Too bad you can barely see the fancy granite we picked out. This is more mail, coupons, bills, lists, school pictures, preschool projects, travel-sized toothpaste and phone messaged. The pile is going vertical by creeping up the wall, too.

Foyer

The pool bag and a stack of at least five beach towels rest on the chest by our front door. At least they're not on the floor anymore.

This pile on the table beside the font door is unusually small -- just Pippi's artwork from today's preschool camp, one list, a copy of The New Yorker and our empty Produce Box.

Living Room

This sad space is my tiny desk, crammed with stickers, Flip cam, iPod, photos, lists, newspaper clippings, birthday party invitations and a basket full of random papers leftover from my last attempt at organization. At least my laptop isn't on the kitchen counter anymore.

Stacked on top of my grandfather's china cabinet you'll find children's books that I bought to give as birthday and new baby gifts. Note that not one of them is wrapped. And on top is the enormous, glamorous hat #5 that Casey (so far accurately) predicted I would never actually wear.

Dining Room

 On one side of the dining room cabinets you'll find my grandmother's deviled egg dish (c'mon, every Southern girl has to have one) hidden by empty gift bags, gift list (for which not one single thank you note has been written), party favors and presents from Junius' birthday party. Which was almost a week ago.

And on the other side of the dining room cabinets, there's the birthday head band thingy, a kid's book CD, a picture from Pippi and a friend-decorated picture frame that needs to have the picture put in it so we can hang it on the wall.

Ugh. 

Clearly I am in desperate need of an intervention from my friends Julie at Simplify Your Life or Molly at Go Mom! Inc. 

How about you? Help me know I'm not alone -- what piles are building up around your house?

Capture the Everyday is about getting you to capture those everyday moments in your life! Each Thursday, Melissa at Adventuroo will issue a simple challenge to capture something that’s a part of your daily life. You can post just a picture or add some words to go along with it. You’ll have a week to get it done and then she’ll issue another. It’s a quick, easy way to start capturing those little parts of life we sometimes take for granted.

Hiring a Wife

For years, I've wanted a wife.

Ever since I read Judy Brady's famous 1971 essay from Ms. Magazine -- and then taught it to baffled high school students who wondered if the author was a lesbian -- I've loved the idea of hiring my own wife. As Brady pointed out, who wouldn't want someone else to clean the house, cook dinner, do the laundry and meet your every need?

So this spring, when I started working a regular paying gig again, my first order of business was to find a good wife. My budget wouldn't allow the full capital-W-Wife treatment, so I had to scale back a bit. A couple of hours each week with Ms. Mary gets me vacuumed floors, cleaned bathrooms and dusted furniture, and that is enough to make a big difference.

But what elevates Ms. Mary from cleaning crew to wife status at our house is that she's also a gourmet cookie baker. So when Junius found a picture from a magazine about how to make cupcakes that look like the LGMs (little green men) from Toy Story, I turned to Ms. Mary for help. And ta-da... the perfect finale to one five-year-old Toy Story 3-themed birthday party.

Having a wife rocks -- and it makes being a wife and mother a whole lot more manageable.
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You Might Be Cute, But Your Sh*t Still Stinks

When Junius was about 10 weeks old, we took him to my cousin's wedding. Because he was prone to spitting up in quantities that defied his tiny body, I didn't dress him in his fancy clothes until we were in the church parking lot -- didn't want to ruin the look. It was one of those beautiful white, pintuck oufits that requires ironing and has impossibly tiny buttons up the back -- one that my husband had worn when he was a baby and his mother saved for us. Completely impractical, but Junius looked so sweet.

So sweet, that is, until his enormous pooplosion leaked out all over the fancy clothes (did I mention it was white?) and onto my husband's suit. Thankfully, we had a change of clothes in the car so that Junius didn't stink at the reception (see photo of him dancing with Nanna) -- and that turned out to be the worst of Juni's poop messes, even counting potty-training last year.

Pippi, however, is another story.

Today, when she woke up from her afternoon nap and started crying for me to come get her, I was on the phone with her Daddy. Apparently, in the few minutes it took for me to get upstairs, she had despaired of ever being rescued and decided to stage a protest... by removing her diaper, squatting on her blanket for a poop, and then smearing it all over everything in her crib. Seriously -- her diaper was clean, but her sheets, blankets, lovey, books and stuffed animals were covered in shit (pardon my French).

After scrubbing her down in the tub, putting on a dry diaper and taking her downstairs to play with her brother, I headed back upstairs to deal with everything in the crib (did I mention it was even on the books? and the pashmina blanket that we got as a gift for Junius and I never let him touch it but thought it was so sweet and girlie for her to have her own baby pashmina?).

I'll spare you the details from here (and be grateful I didn't stop in the midst of all the crap to take a photo -- you don't want to know). But I'm hoping against hope that this is Pippi's one poop disaster. Is it a bad sign that I'm already afraid about potty training with her?

Now it's your turn to share a poop disaster story so that I can feel better (or at least not alone) about my parenting. And feel free to make your own puns about hitting the fan.