July 25, 2010: Good hot fun

Well, I did it. I managed to throw a birthday party for a one-year-old and that party didn't suck. The weather did, mind you. Rain and thunder storms all day with an added bonus temperature of 92. But we think we showed people a mighty fine time in spite of it, complete with bear cupcakes (from Clare Crespo's excellent Hey There Cupcake), a bear piñata, and really cheesy bear decorations from the dollar store (don't even get me started about how hard it is to find bear party decorations and favors and stuff. Monkeys? No problem. They're everywhere. Even "tractors" is an easier to pull together theme. But bears? Nobody likes bears any more, I guess. If you want to have a bear theme it had better be Winnie the Pooh, Care Bears, or Kung Fu Panda, otherwise you're out of luck unless you want to spend a zillion dollars and/or make everything yourself because time and money are never in short supply with a one-year-old at home.

Piñatas are pretty much the best thing ever at a birthday party, I am convinced. Our bear piñata was purchased from Honey Bee Market in Detroit and is an authentic piñata, not the mass produced Dora the Explorer garbage you can buy from, say, Party City or K-Mart. You can tell that ours is authentic because when it was cracked open the layers of newspaper inside are all in Spanish. One of the most prominent visible headlines was about a family being killed in a fire. Happy First Birthday! I went a little overboard in stuffing the piñata considering there were only four kids at the party and in the presence of kids most grown ups will not, for some reason, descend on the extricated contents. Probably out of a self-conscious sense of dignity or something. Our friends' two daughters, for example, made off with more from our piñata than they got from their Halloween haul. Because it was so hot and humid everything that emerged from the piñata was damp and sticky, but this was no deterrent. Stacy insisted that we include little boxes of raisins and I am sad but not surprised to report that these did not fair well under the constant barrage of swings from the murder bat, an old wooden bat we inherited from Stacy's mom's husband, I believe, that looks like, well, a murder bat. In fact, when it was piñata time I came up from the basement with the bat and some nylon rope -- let's just say I was given a wide berth.

Bottom line: Gavin had a really good time and people managed to squeeze themselves in throughout our very small home. Stacy and I also had a good time as did, I believe, many of our guests who told us so themselves (granted, they could have been lying, but some folks even put it up on Facebook and as everyone knows, nobody lies on Facebook, ever, because it's public and all).

Gavin and Stacy and I are lucky to have so many good people in our lives. Sadly a lot of them are far away. But I try to look at it as if Gavin has a national fan base. Even international, since our friend Janeski is in Canada. That way when he goes on tour we'll always have a place to stay.