Birthdays

J is now ten. I meant to report on her birthday, because I was very pleased with the cleverness of the Gift Presentation. Her big gift was a Yogibo lounging-bag-type-thing. I don’t really get the appeal of these things, honestly, but the girls always want to go into the store whenever we’re at Crossgates. A while back at the Carrot Festival, where I was tabling, the Yogibo people had a booth, and there was some fabulous discount, probably because no one wanted to schlep the stock back to the store. We oh-so-sneakily smuggled a ginormous bag of not-beans into our garage, where it hibernated under a tarp until J’s birthday.

But, of course, wrapping that bad boy was going to be tough. So, the night before her birthday, we put the Yogibo down in the basement playroom, and then I unwound a long string from the Yogibo, up the stairs, outside, around the front lawn, in through the screened porch, and into our dining room. Then in the morning, she unwrapped a gift that was just tissue paper, more tissue paper, and nothing else but a little note that read,

Holy cow. There isn’t even a present in here? What the heck kind of stinky birthday is this? Maybe you should ask your family if they have some chewed-up gum or a used tissue or an old piece of string or something. . . .

And then Cute W fished a piece of gum out of his mouth, and I blew my nose extravagantly and offered up the tissue, and M offered her the end of the piece of string. And she took the string, which obviously led somewhere, and followed it down to her gift.

So that was fun. We still haven’t had her kids’ birthday party. . . she was undecided about what she wanted to do, and finally settled on a trip to Flight Trampoline Park, but of course it’s a busy place, and we’ve got tons going on, too, so by the time we settled on it, we had to schedule it for later this month. And we’re going with a gymnastics cake, which I believe will be a normal cake with silhouette cut-outs of gymnasts slapped onto the sides.

Yesterday, J and I went to see “Newsies” at Proctors, and I wrote this review for KidsOutAndAbout.com. Then, last night, Cute W and I had a date night at Aperitivo Bistro, where we enjoyed calamari, among other things.

I didn’t take pictures of everything. In fact, I didn’t even take this picture. I started to do it, except I didn’t have my camera (I lost it a while back), and then my phone was dead. So my sweet husband took the picture. And then got me a new camera for my birthday. And also let me drink way more than my half of the bottle of wine. It’s a good life, my friends. And I would write more, except that after take-out Thai food and homemade chocolate cake, every system in my body that isn’t essential to maintaining life and/or digestion is shutting down.