A Nightmare Weekend With Eight Little Girls

Friday, Speakeasy came by and gave us an offer we couldn't refuse, so now Omaha and I have joined the Low Beyond with a full 256up/1024dn connection. It does make a difference, and BitTorrent has changed my television habits as badly as TiVo ever could. It took forever to get the router configured properly, especially with NAT and all the rest. Since I use a DNS collator and provide filters for both web and email for the folks in my house, getting the router up and running was more work than I would have thought, but now we have real time streaming into the house. I can watch NHK again! Cool!

Saturday, after breakfast, Omaha and I were up and out the door to go shopping for all of Kouryou-chan's presents and so forth. We did it in double-teams, with Omaha hitting one set of stores while I did another. Kouryou-chan went with us and she was actually pretty good while we drove her everywhere; about the only time she had a bad moment was in Ikea, when she saw the children's ball room and wanted to go in. FallenPegasus was shopping in the area, and we ran into him in the mall. Funny, that.

Sunday was more of the same. Go here, get that. Clean this room. Wash that. Hang up these ribbons. Inflate those ballons. Glue this together. Take that apart. Wrap these. Go get Yamaarashi-chan from her mother. Get back.

Meanwhile, Omaha was working her own butt off making a gorgeous cake for the party, pink frosted with purple trim and two towers made out of a ice cream cones (cake cones for the base, sugar cones for the tower), all glued together with more frosting. Kouryou-chan managed to get a nasty rug-burn while running around with the other children. Eventually, we had eight screaming little girls all running about dressed in their princess costumery and all the women in the kitchen talking and all the men sitting about doing man things. It was a blast-- exhausting, but a blast. I made a liter of Shirley Temple for the girls to drink. They played pin-the-tail on the unicorn. ( Picture of girls playing )

Omaha told the story of the Princess and the Pea and then the girls had to guess how many peas were in a jar, and then we all sat around and counted them. Great way to occupy them utterly for fifteen minutes, and the girl who came closest got a lovely silvery bracelet.

And then it was wind-down time. I took Yamaarashi-chan back to her mother's house. We ate pizza. We went to bed. Yamaarashi-chan had a bad night and woke us up four or five times.

Lesson learned: start preparing earlier. Two weeks is not enough time to put together a party of that magnitude.

"I'm Blogging This"

One of the games Kouryou-chan likes to play at Chez Sternberg is "exploring the dark." The game is simple: we grownups scatter items of a certain category (pennies, say, or stuffed annimals) about the house, and then Kouryou-chan armed only with a flashlight gets to turn off all the lights and go look for them. Since we live in a neighborhood with no streetlights, this is a very effective game.

Omaha, FallenPegasus, and I were sitting down after a dinner of home-made chili when Kouryou-chan decided she wanted to play this game. So Omaha scattered pennies and then Kouryou-chan went looking for them. She had them all up after about ten minutes, and in the dark holding the flashlight she said, "What do we do now?"

I grouped up on top of the refrigerator for my laser pointer and then slowly eased it down the hallway. Kouryou-chan broke into squeals of laughter and chased it down, aiming her flashlight beam for where the laser light emerged. I followed a short distance behind her, sending her into master bedroom, her bedroom, down the hall to the living room, and around the island that separates the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen.

"You are an evil man," FallenPegasus said.

"Why? Because I'm using a cat-toy on my four-year old?"

"Yes," he said. "And it's working."

I laughed at that, then said, "I'm blogging this."