This post is from from my other blog here

I've really set myself up to fail with Maya's big birthday party. This all started when I didn't want to clean my house before and after a birthday party. Really, having a party here would have been unwise as it turns out, since we just killed a rattlesnake at the bottom of our back stairs, and having 20-something 3 year olds running around the yard... I can't even finish that sentence without starting a panic attack.

So I rented out a park, but because of where we live, it's a good 30 minutes away from our house. So it became easier to get all the food and everything in Folsom instead of do any of it here, and the money started pouring out of my bank account.

Then I had this great idea for goody bags that I figured I could pull off if I planned in advance. I had a supplier lined up. They knew how many I needed and when, and then when it was time to pull the trigger, they promptly flaked. I managed to find another supplier (and I will unveil all the gloriousness of the party after it's over and probably looks a lot less fabulous), but they can't get the stuff in until today, and I'm waiting for the phone call that it has been received and can be sent to me from Petaluma. We shall see if this whole thing comes together, but more than likely, on Friday I will be running all over town trying to find "good enough" crap to throw in these goody bags. And everyone will be just as happy as they would have been if everything had worked out.

Balloons, decorations, cake, food, drinks, ice, coolers, candy, goody bags, pinata, etc., etc. I'm very good at logistics but not so good at handling the effects of stress (and even worse at execution, but we'll deal with that).

Maya is so excited about her party that she can't barely function. We've been counting how many more nights she'll have to sleep before her party every morning, and this morning she told me she slept so good that it should be time for her party already. I agree. The sooner the better before I lose anymore hair.

Maya got her big birthday present early and was awarded a small pink bicycle (with hair, she says to describe the pom poms hanging off her handlebars) on Saturday.

This post is from from my other blog here

It's hard to keep up with things when a) the kids can't stay healthy and b) you are working two jobs. Certainly cuts into your spare time and your ability to update family members on mundane things.

Maya's birthday is in less than 3 weeks, and we are deep in the planning stages of her enormous birthday party. I'm talking the BURNING MAN of 4-year-old birthday parties. Mike and I are not really up on our birthday party etiquette, so we decided not to leave anyone out, and we invited 27 children to this party hoping to God that half of them didn't show up. We rented a park out. We've bought a pinata. We toyed with the idea of getting a root beer keg and then decided it's hard enough making friends around here, why would we want to piss off 27 sets of parents?

Sadie has picked up Maya's very best words and says mostly NO and MINE. When she starts saying WHY, I will stab myself in the ears with a knitting needle and hope I don't heal for a year.

When Maya was about a year old, she'd sit down in her Elmo chair and busy herself with a dozen books for 20 minutes or so (when someone else was watching her). Sadie saw books as more of a weapon. Or something to pull down from the bookshelf and cover the floor with twelve times a day. Now that she can say BOOK and READ, she is constantly asking to be read to. I was getting a little worried about it what with all the grown up TV she gets exposed to from her big sister. Maya got to start out with Teletubbies and Sesame Street, and Sadie has been fast tracked to the Land Before Time movies and the Magic Schoolbus (which is way over both their heads).

Sadie is also singing. It's hard to know what she's saying unless you hear it all the time, but she will sing several songs to herself all day long. I'm anxious to see what she thinks the words are, since she's learning the songs from Maya. This is Maya's interpretation of Baa Baa Black Sheep:

Baa Baa Black Sheep
Papa Nany No
Yessir Yessir three bags old

One for the Raffi
One for the day
One for the little one's Christmas Joy

Baa Baa Black Sheep
Papa Nany No
Yessir Yessir three bags old

If Sadie further distorts those words, what are we going to get? Is it a good idea to have a third child just to see what happens to the song when Sadie teaches it to her younger sibling?

This post is from from my other blog here

Despite all my good planning and anal practice of wrapping presents as they were purchased, we still had an exhausting countdown to Christmas. Sadie was sick. Again. Yesterday was our third doctor's visit for this particular illness, and this is round 4 of antibiotics. In addition to being sick, she was also constipated. This may be too much detail for some of you to stomach, but I just have to say that the child was producing granite from her back end just about hourly for days at a time. We're attacking it with medicine droppers of prune juice and glycerine suppositories. The illness barely touched Maya, but Mike was staggering around the place like the undead. Place a very busy week of work on top of that, and suddenly, you have a very disorganized Christmas Eve.

Mike had purchased several presents at the last minute, all of which needed wrapping. In addition, we had one simple gift to assemble. Based on the box, I had allotted about 30 minutes to putting it together. Lesson delivered: the box contained 3 billion parts, all of which needed to be unwrapped, organized, and then attached with a screwdriver according to IKEA-style directions. It took Mike and I about 3 hours to get everything done. The Christmas Eve I had envisioned where we loaf around and watch movies was toast. We staggered to bed, where (like nearly every night that week) I got about 3 hours sleep with a very sick Sadie before they both woke up.

Christmas morning, everyone was cheerful. Even Sadie postponed her suffering for the couple of hours it took to open presents. Maya has her most precious objects laid out on the dining room table (out of Sadie's reach), and we basically don't see her for most of the day while she plays with her Diego Rescue Center and the A-Z Learning Zoo. Occasionally she wanders into the living room to grab some dinosaurs and ask us to "make them talk" before she runs out on another rescue mission.

Sadie mostly loves the kitchen that took us so long to put together. She picks up the cell phone and says "Hi" and "Bye" into it (and I swear, people, I am rarely on the phone--she's just that sharp), and puts plastic food into the oven while she chatters away to herself.

This post is from from my other blog here