Category — Party!

Do you ever read one of those magazines and they’ll say “So-and-so hosted a casual buffet with some neighbors and invited us to see her easy-breezy style”? And what follows is several pages of impossibly gorgeous spreads of food surrounded by distinctive and clever decor and people who look impeccable and beautiful in every way? And you think, “Who the hell hosts a party like that?” Well, once a year my big sister does with her Easter Egg Hunt and Lunch.  Here are some pictures:

Cute bunny adorning the dessert table.

Plenty of fresh flowers already planted (she’s in New Jersey, so it’s a bit warmer).

An Easter wreath. One decor tip I’m going to try to adopt is that she has all of her decorative wall hangings–like autumn and Christmas wreaths–hanging out in plain sight around her basement. It makes the storage area prettier and more cheerful, makes it more difficult to forget about seasonal decor, and frees up shelf space.

J insisted that I take a photograph of the deviled egg tray. She loved how her aunt fancied it up.

Hi from the girls, playing on the hammock.

Bunny ears for everyone!

So pretty they look fake. But they’re alive!

Frankly, I think the woman has a wreath fetish. But who can blame her? And I love this door, too.

What’s a pile of asparagus without pansies?

More flowers!

Pretty again.

Pansy.

For the egg hunt, a plastic egg tried to blend in with the decorative eggs.

More egg hunt.

Another “hidden” egg.

J’s attended 2 of her 3 birthday parties of the weekend, and I hung around Friday’s party long enough that I couldn’t resist taking a couple of pictures to share.

First, rainbow fruit skewers. . . cute, right?

Lucky for me, some of the kids were suspicious of the mangoes, which were recruited to represent orange even though the birthday family aren’t mango fans, either. So at party pick-up I proceeded to eat a vast amount of mango. I love me some mango, especially when I don’t have to go to the trouble of cutting it myself!

You might remember that for J’s Halloween-themed birthday party, the kids pinned spiders on the web. At Friday’s party, the girls pinned the hat on the birthday girl (yes, we pinned a hat poorly in keeping with the no-current-front-portraits tradition).

And the Birthday Girl requested the same cupcakes that she wants every year. They’re baked in ice cream cones!

When I started taking pictures for a post, my friend insisted that I recommend Pinterest for birthday ideas. (Incidentally, I’m “doing” Pinterest, too, although I’ve barely pinned anything yet.) Here’s her board with a couple of items that she pinned. Which reminds me of another great idea that I didn’t get a chance to photograph: pre-scooping ice cream into cupcake holders, then popping them back into the freezer until it’s time to serve the cake. How smart is that, right?

Perfect pool weather! Or beach weather! Alas, we’re not getting wet. In fact, when J was offered the opportunity to go swimming with a friend today, she refused out of pure sisterly loyalty.

So in our search for dry-but-fun outdoor activities, an obvious one was mini-golf. For the 4th of July, we decided to go with a new destination (we’ve been to the Control Tower and Glenville Sportsplex) and have lunch and ice cream.

We tried Oasis Family Fun Park in Troy. We started out with a lunch of champions, including cheeseburgers, hot dogs, chicken fingers, and fries. There was a bargain deal including pizza, but the pizza didn’t look great. The cheeseburgers and hot dogs were pretty tasty. We ate in the Clubhouse, but if I were to do it again, I’d carry the food out to some picnic tables behind the Clubhouse in the shade. And if you’re wondering if you can bring your own picnic, the answer is no.

Cute W and I basically felt sick to our stomachs for the rest of the day, but I don’t think that it’s a particular reflection on their food–we’re just usually better eaters than that. Oh, yeah: except we also all had chocolate chip waffles for breakfast, too. Okay, okay. . . it was not exactly a Jamie Oliver-approved day of eating. Perhaps there was excessive pity-indulgence going on. In my defense, I’d like to offer that today the girls had spinach smoothies for breakfast and about 3 cups-worth of carrots and snap peas while watching tv.  What, your children were chomping on vegetables while playing boisterously and imaginatively outdoors?  Okay, you win. But it is very difficult to pass the time on a sunny day in the 80s without involving water.

Sorry–I’m whining. And I’m off-track. Anyway. . .

Mini-golfing was fun. It cost $6.50 per grown-up (13+) and $4.50 per kid. I particularly appreciated the holes that were shady and the occasional blowing droplets from the waterfall. Especially since I’m used to the unbelievably sweltering Control Tower. Frequently I feel like mini-golf courses seem squashed into a tiny place, but this felt pretty spacious. At a favorite hole, we hit the balls into a stream, and they were carried through the water, over a grate, and onto the next green.

Cute W's ball is carried on the current

Oasis also has laser tag, a bouncy-bounce thing called the “Defender Dome” (which was closed when we were there) and a paddle boat activity. Actually, I chuckled at the paddle boat area when I first arrived, because it really looked basically like a glorified pool. But after the mini-golfing, we watched folks happily paddling and splashing around. You can go under the waterfall to get completely wet if you’d like.

We finished off the outing with some ice cream. The staff were friendly and quite patient with the girls as they pondered flavor choices. They have hard (Perry’s) & soft ice cream, frozen yogurt, and smoothies.

Oh, and yes: they do birthday parties, as well as season passes.

One of the many items Cute W decided that we needed to pack for our Lake Placid trip was our washers game. Washers is the perfect casual, backyard, while-you’re-having-a-barbecue game.

After playing it at a friend’s house, handy Cute W whipped up this frame–there are two of them.

Rules vary from player to player, but ours are pretty simple. One person (or team) has 3 silver washers, the other person (or team) has 3 spray-painted washers (I’ve got them piled up at the bottom of the wood). You separate the two washer boards, then take turns throwing your washers.

Each side gets points for which hole the washers land in, but points are canceled out if you get the same thing. So, for example, if player one tosses one in the grass, one in the 5 hole, and one in the 2 hole, and then player two tosses one in the 3 hole, one on the wood,  and one in the 2 hole, then their scores are 5 and 3 respectively, because the twos cancel each other out.

You win either by accumulating 21 points or by tossing a washer onto the bolt along the top (see there? between the 4 and the 3?)

Simple, but trust me: it’s an excellent game, especially for mixed age groups, because young and old can play. If you do teams, it’s a nice social activity while you’re chatting and having a beer.

There are a wide variety of variations on how to design and play a washers game, but keep in mind, when folks are enthusiastic enough to create a website devoted to washers, it indicates that they take washers pretty seriously. We prefer to sort of wing it. For us, that’s the spirit of the game.

Check out the International Association of Washer Players , Washer Game Players, or Bomb at Washers for more information, variations, and rules.

We had pretty much tired ourselves out today by 2 pm.  We saw Rumpelstiltskin at Steamer 10 Theatre, then we had a quick bite at home and headed out to ice skate at Union College.   If  we go to a show again this week, I think we’d make it a nap-time show at 1 pm for a possibly more subdued audience, but the puppeteer was great, and he really appealed to the crowd.   I received an email after my big week-long round-up about the public skating at Union–the hours are updated on their site.

I’ve been loving ice skating lately because it  brings out the best in the sister relationship.  My girls do enjoy each other’s company often–they’ll play for quite a while together, especially if you don’t say something stupid like, “Wow, you girls sure are having fun together today!”, which only reminds them that they’re supposed to be enemies.  But we do have problems.   There tends to be a lot of M-as-Bully and J-as-Victim, although of course I try my best not to label them because, hey, of course I read Siblings Without Rivalry and I know I’m not supposed to be setting them up by giving them a role that they then feel compelled to play out and all of that, blah, blah blah.  Yeah, I know, and I’m doing my best, here.  Incidentally, practically every chapter highlights the main points in comic strip form, so it’s an excellent skimmer.

But anyway, M is competitive, and she’s always trying to compete with J.  I say to M:  J is more than 2 years younger than you, she doesn’t know how to read, she’s not at the big kids’ school yet, she has trouble getting toothpaste out of the tube. . . you don’t need to compete with her because you can wipe the floor with her.  Well, okay, I don’t say it exactly like that, but come on.    So that certain je ne sais quoi that makes ice skating so delightful?  M is better at it than all of us.  She is so deeply secure in her superiority that she will graciously give me pointers on how to skate backwards (“Bend your knees more!  And wiggle your butt, but not too much because it’s so embarrassing, mom!!”), or she will solicitously fetch J a bucket or her mittens.  J will do a “trick” and M will applaud her.  Then J is so overwhelmed with gratitude and love that she hugs M and M sheepishly holds J up when fervent joy threatens to literally bowl them both over.   J did so well today that I couldn’t believe it, and I was 95% proud and excited and 5% worried that if she improves too quickly this special magic will be gone.

Anyway.  In spite of my Chinese post title yesterday, the party last night was celebrating the more generally Asian Lunar New Year, with a big focus on Korean food and culture.   The spread was ridiculously huge and delicious.  I mean, it was out of control.  The highlight was a traditional dish, Bee-Bim Bop.  I Googled it oh-so-briefly and found that there was a kids’ picture book about this very dish.  You start with rice and pile all sorts of things on top of it. . . we had carrots, sprouts, cucumber, anchovies, octupus, kim chi, beef, some sort of noodles, traditional sauce, and some other stuff.  It was super-tasty.

How pretty are these scallion thingies?  When I went to look at the pictures W had taken, I realized that I’d somehow missed eating these–very sad.

They also had a Jesa table set up, with is another Korean tradition, a small memorial with different foods and items offered up to ancestors.  So we had a nice little culture lesson along with the party.  It was all great fun, and when I told M “five more minutes” she said, “Already?!?” even though we’d been there for hours.  Lucky for her, W started chit-chatting and it actually turned out to be another hour.

W had off today–that’s part of the reason why we had to rush and skate today, so that he could test out his new Valentine’s ice skates–so tomorrow the real February break starts in earnest for us.  We’ve had such a busy weekend that I haven’t planned what we’ll do tomorrow at all yet.