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Late Friday afternoon I called Beth at work to find out what kind of toppings she wanted on the pizza I was about to order and we started talking about a problem she was having at work. After a while she said she was leaving it behind and coming home, where she would spend the weekend making a tree-shaped cake and turning the living room into a forest for June’s birthday party.

“It’ll be fun,” I said encouragingly and she agreed.

And it was fun, but also a lot of work, especially for Beth, who hurt her back on Saturday and wasn’t feeling well, but nevertheless soldiered on with decorations and baking.  There was more decorating for this party than any other we’ve done because June’s oft stated goal for the party was for the guests feel “like they’re walking into a forest” on arriving. It sounded like a high bar.

So of course, preparations had begun weeks earlier. At first June said she wanted a fairies party and I thought that would be a nice easy theme, but then she changed her mind to forest. I was initially doubtful, but a quick visit to a party company website made me realize we could mix and match supplies from various party themes to make an eclectic forest party.  June said she wanted it to be a spooky forest, so we found a spider piñata, bats to hang from the ceiling, owl plates and napkins, stuffed owls and owl tattoos for the goody bags, along with frog finger puppets and magic worms.  Do you remember these? They are brightly colored, furry worms with nylon strings attached that allow you to weave them through your fingers. I’m pretty sure they were around in our day, as both Beth and I found their slithery movement evocative when Noah demonstrated their use.

A couple weeks before the party, and after such extensive consultations between June and her friend Megan that I quipped that Megan was the equivalent of June’s maid of honor, the two girls spent part of a play date making paper animals—two foxes, a squirrel, a chipmunk, a moose and a bat—to decorate the living room.  Noah contributed an illustration of a bear, printed out on several pieces of computer paper.

There were two trips to a party supply store, one the weekend before the party for more goody bag favors and decorations, and one the day before the party for balloons.  Over the course of the weekend, we slowly transformed the living room into a forest.  There were strings of butterflies hanging from the ceiling and a line of bats dangling from the beam between the living and dining rooms. Some of our Halloween decorations (the giant spider on its web and the raven) emerged from their boxes in the basement for an unusual late winter holiday.  June took a dark blue blanket and arranged it into a river on the living room carpet, complete with a stuffed frog and turtle.  But the crowning glory was the two trees Beth and the kids made out of cardboard and three different shades of green crepe paper. Finally, June and I waited to see if the cold, cloudy weather on party day would turn to rain but a few hours before the party when it hadn’t, we chalked two hollow trees on the sidewalk leading up to the porch. June’s had an owl perched on a branch and its nest on another branch.

Saturday Beth baked the cake, a lemon cake at June’s request, and Sunday she carved it into a tree shape and frosted it.  It was, as always, a feat of artistry. I told her if not for the children she’d never had realized her gift for cake decorating.

The party was Sunday afternoon, coincidentally Saint Patrick’s Day.  We were having six days before June’s actual birthday because the real date is the first day of spring break and we learned our lesson about planning a party during break when she turned four and half her guests couldn’t come.  (We forgot the other lesson of that party, which was to check for soccer conflicts, so Megan missed the first game of the season in order to come—June’s not playing soccer this spring so it slipped our minds.)  In honor of the holiday, June selected leprechaun hats for all her guests, plus herself and Noah. She handed them out as soon as guests started arriving.

Once everyone had arrived, we split the guests into two groups by having them draw slips of paper from a witch’s hat that either said “Butterfly Joy” or “Flapping Owls.”  The butterflies went to the living room to play a co-operative board game called Birds of Summer and the owls went to the dining room to work on a craft kit called Forest Friends, an early birthday present from me.  (The board game we already had. In fact, I think it was a gift Noah got for his seventh birthday.)

The kids and I had played the game on Friday afternoon so Noah and I, who hadn’t played it in years, could reacquaint ourselves with the rules and so June, who’d never played before, could decide if she liked it well enough to play it at the party.  The object of the game is to build birds’ nests and defend them from predators. Everyone works together and you all win if more nests are saved than lost at the end of the game. Noah ran this game twice, explaining it to each group and patiently helping them with rules and strategy as they played. The first group seemed to enjoy it and did very well; the second group lost interest before they managed to finish but they played most of a game. There was only one nest left in question when the game dissolved.

Meanwhile, over in the dining room I helped the other girls get the forest animal craft started. You punch out the pieces (which make a deer, raccoon, fox, tree, bush, and mushroom) decorate them by number with different colored foam squares and jewel stickers and then fit the pieces together and arrange them into a tableaux.  This activity proved quite popular with both groups. (And one of the guests commented she had the unicorn version at home.) The only disappointment was that I had to keep telling the girls (one in particular) that they could not take the completed pieces home because they’d been working on them together and there was no fair way to assign them.  Also, the kit wasn’t quite finished when they stopped and I knew June would want to finish it and arrange it the whole scene herself.

The next activity was Pin the Legs on the Spider.  Pin the Tail on the Cat had been such a hit at June’s last party this was an obvious choice.  June painted the spider and legs herself a week or so before the party.  Apparently there’s almost nothing as funny as watching your blindfolded friends stumble toward the door or into the birthday girl’s mother while holding out a painted spider leg with tape attached.  Eventually each participant found (or was gently guided to) the target and in the end the spider had legs all over it, though only two coming out of the side of its body at a remotely realistic angle. One was Talia’s, and the other one was Noah’s but his blindfold slipped so he could see what he was doing. He claimed it wasn’t cheating because it fell on its own, but some of June’s guests disagreed (with more laughter than rancor, though).

Next they took turns whacking at a purple spider hanging from the dogwood tree. This was June’s first party at which the piñata was not broken by an adult or an older sibling.  Some time during the second or third round, once there were several promising cracks in it, Goldie took a good whack at it and it split open in a very satisfying way, spilling its booty of candy and little plastics bugs and glow-in-the-dark aliens all over the ground.  No adult help needed. “They’re getting big,” Beth noted, half-sadly.

Next it was inside for cake and ice cream.  We ran out of activities about twenty minutes before the designated end of the party. This was new, too. I’m more used to parents arriving while the kids are still eating cake, or hitting the piñata.  Maybe six and seven year olds take less wrangling to get from one activity to the next than little kids or maybe I just didn’t plan enough, but they seemed to enjoy running around like maniacs in the yard so it all ended well.

Megan was the last guest to leave and she really wanted June to open her presents while she was still there, so she did, finding a stuffed raccoon that makes a squeaking noise, a ribbon on a stick for twirling and a t-shirt with a cat on a bicycle.  When Megan had left June opened the rest of her presents and after a brief intermission in which she finished her poster about England due at school the next day, she spent the rest of the afternoon and evening twirling the ribbon stick, finishing the mosaic animals, coloring a cupcake-shaped purse, playing two rounds of Operation with her brother and mothers, playing with the My Little Pony figures, and testing out the homemade lavender-scented foot pillow.  At bedtime, she was begging to play a round of Crazy Faces (a Crazy Eights type game) but all good things must come to an end, even birthday party days.

Shortly before she got into bed, she reminded us, “Just because my party’s over it doesn’t mean my birthday is over.”  And it’s not. On the first day of spring break she will open her presents from us and from extended family, and then we’ll drive to the beach. I think we’ll get cupcakes from a bakery there to celebrate.  Some time in between, probably Friday, she will take a bag of frog finger puppets and owl tattoos to share with her classmates and they will sing “Happy Birthday” to her in two languages.

In the morning she worked with her new stamp kit to make notes for a couple of her friends and for me and for Beth. Mine says, “YOU ARE MY LOVE,” with two roses below it. Softened, I let her wear her red cloth dress coat to school, even though I have previously tried to reserve it for special occasions. Anyway, I have an inkling that every day between the party and her actual birthday is going to be a special occasion. After all, you only turn seven once.

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Nigel: Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You’re on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty: I don’t know.

Nigel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

From This is Spinal Tap

Wednesday and Thursday: Up to Eleven

The last night Noah was ten years old, we were busy with birthday preparations.  June had wanted to get him a book for his birthday and an attempt to find a suitable one at a local toy store earlier in the week had failed, so we needed to make an online purchase. I’d been dithering and hadn’t bought anything but the immediacy of the deadline focused my mind. I picked three titles and slightly after June’s bedtime she crawled into my lap as I sat at the computer and I showed her pictures of the covers and gave her a brief summary of each one.  “I’m going to stay up?” she said at first, and then, “I can’t believe you’re telling me about scary, big-kid books.” She was delighted, as if I was letting her in on a big secret by telling her that Something Upstairs is “about a boy who makes friends with a ghost.” That was the book she picked, incidentally.  So I printed out an image of the cover for her to give him in the morning and we were set.

Beth and Noah were making a batch of homemade chocolate chip ice cream for his party on Saturday—our ice cream maker produces fairly small batches and Noah wanted three so they were getting an early start.  They’d already made frosting for his school party the night before. (Noah and a classmate who shares his birthday had hatched a plan for her to bring in cookies and him to bring in frosting and have a frost-your-own-cookie party at school.) Beth helped Noah with his math while the ice cream churned. After he went to bed, I finished wrapping presents and listened to him toss and turn for longer than usual. It’s hard to fall asleep when you’re teetering on the verge of eleven.

Meanwhile, Beth retreated to the basement where she set to work assembling his drum set, his big present.  The drums are second-hand and when Beth got them out of the boxes she discovered several components were missing—the cymbals, the bass drum foot pedal and the snare drum stand.  The previous drummer had cut a hole in the drumhead of the bass drum and adorned it with stickers including one of a scantily clad woman posing with a gas pump nozzle.  Still, it was a real drum kit. I thought he’d like it.

We had Noah open his presents that morning before school.  He got two games from Grandmom and Pop, two t-shirts (the numeral eleven shirt and one from my sister with the symbol for pi, made up of the numerals of pi), a pair of summer pajamas, and a half a dozen books (including June’s promise of a book to come).  He wanted to linger, reading the backs of books, inspecting the numbers of the pi shirt, but Beth was concerned about getting out the door on time and she kept saying, “Next present!” and handing them to June to give to him.  When the presents were all unwrapped Beth said she thought there was something else she’d left in the basement, and we all trooped down there.  She pulled the old bed sheets off the drums and for a moment all Noah could say was “Whoa! Whoa!”

June hopped up on the stool, or “throne” as it’s called, and started to play the drums with her hands like bongo drums while Beth explained how she was writing to the store to see what had become of the missing parts and told him we could get the drumhead replaced unless he liked the sound of the cut one (some drummers do cut them intentionally, which is no doubt what happened to this one). Beth told June to give Noah a turn on his own drums and he ran upstairs to get his sticks and then started to play the drums, looking quite serious as he did so.

As it turned out, Beth and Noah didn’t have time to walk to his bus stop so they were waiting to catch a Ride-On when I came back from June’s bus stop. “Do you have the frosting?” I asked and he dashed back into the house.

That afternoon Noah considered practicing on the new drums but decided the missing snare drum stand would not allow him to practice his snare part for the upcoming band concert well enough so he used his old set-up in the study instead.  He brought the throne upstairs to sit on, though.

He didn’t have much homework, so after he finished it and practiced percussion, he had time to experiment with dying baking soda red before dinner.  Why did he need red baking soda, you might ask?  Noah had another mystery party, his third consecutive one.  He keeps doing it over and over again because although his guests have fun and he seems to be having fun as well, when the parties are over he always stews about how it didn’t go precisely as he planned so he keeps trying to get it exactly right.

This year he decided on several key changes.  He would have a smaller guest list—just four boys— and he’d assign them characters instead of having it be more of a free-for-all scavenger hunt.  He had two detectives, a cartographer and a villain.  Sasha was the villain, and as such, Noah thought he ought to help devise the story and the clues, so last weekend he invited him over to work on it.  While Sasha was uncharacteristically hesitant and deferential (I think he was unsure what Noah wanted from him), I see his influence.  Noah has stuck to theft as the crime in his mysteries to date, but this one’s a murder mystery.  The red powder was for a trail of bloody flour to be left on the sidewalk. (The murder victims were all bakers.)

I made Noah a birthday dinner of egg noodles with broccoli, carrots, butter and Parmesan cheese.  Afterward we had fancy pastries from Takoma Bistro since there wouldn’t be cake until his party. Noah chose the chocolate Napoleon of the four pastries I’d selected while the kids were at school. Beth brought YaYa’s present home from work, where it had been shipped.  It’s a Perplexus ball, a 3-D marble maze enclosed in a clear plastic sphere.

After June was in bed, Beth and Noah worked on another batch of ice cream for the party, and experimented with audio effects for the party. In between Beth talked to someone from the music store about getting the missing pieces of the kit shipped to us and Noah did a math worksheet he thought he’d left at school and discovered fifteen minutes before bedtime. And then he climbed into bed, wearing his “Rock Legend” pajamas ten minutes after bedtime on his first night as an eleven year old.

“Did you have a good birthday?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said earnestly, but then he added that it didn’t have the same “jibe” as it used to, though.  “Probably because I’ve done it ten times before.”  So I said a fond goodnight to my jaded tween and left his bedroom.

Saturday and Sunday: That Extra Push off the Cliff

The party was not until five in the afternoon because we needed to accommodate a baseball game and weekend full of Boy Scout activities for all his guests to be able to attend.  This gave us plenty of time to clean the house and work on party preparations.  I cleaned the dining room, living room, and study and swept and mopped the front porch and mowed part of the lawn. Noah vacuumed and helped me move the porch furniture onto the lawn in preparation for cleaning the porch floor.  Beth cleaned the bathroom, took June to Kung Fu and the library, ran errands (many of them party-related) and made the cake.  It was simple, as Noah’s birthday cakes go, a rectangular cake with white frosting, decorative black stripes down the sides and thirteen red dots on top, meant to evoke drops of blood. (There were thirteen murder victims—a baker’s dozen, get it?)

Noah kept saying he didn’t feel very stressed about the party.  A little more stress earlier in the day might not have been a bad thing because at 4:55 he was completely unprepared.  He’d staggered the guests’ arrival times so he could have time to give them individual instructions, but when the twins arrived, he wasn’t ready for them and they had to play by themselves in the yard and wait for him. When Elias got there Noah had only just started to brief one twin and the other was still waiting.  Fortunately, Sasha didn’t need any instructions as he’d written most of the clues and knew what was going on.  He was sent to wait in the bathroom to be found.  It’s a good thing Beth cleaned it because the party unfolded largely outside and that was the only room where anyone spent any time. In fact, Sasha spent a good deal of the party waiting in the bathroom. I felt sorry for him, but he had co-written the clues that were giving everyone so much trouble, and Noah keeps a lot of books and magazines in there and there were even burning candles for atmosphere, so I hope it wasn’t too boring for him.  At any rate, he didn’t complain.  He’s a good friend.

Outside, thing were not unfolding as seamlessly as Noah had hoped.  At his two previous mystery parties, there had been problems locating the clues—they went missing, or were discovered out of order or by the wrong team one year when there were teams.  Noah managed to avoid that kind of logistical problem this year. He’d even done a dry run with Beth on Friday evening to help everything proceed smoothly.  This year the problem seemed to be that the guests couldn’t figure out the clues. And once they got discouraged, only David was really giving it his all.  Richard was more interested in playing the slingshot he’d been issued and spraying Noah with the garden hose. Noah was visibly frustrated and not as polite as he could have been. He gave them hints that helped move the search along, but he wasn’t gracious about it and a on a few occasions he berated his guests. I think being flustered and rushed at the beginning of the party made it hard for him to keep his composure. He’d also scraped his knee and shin badly when he fell down on the sidewalk right before the party and he was in too much of rush to let me clean it.

Finally, and with a good deal of help, the detectives found the murderer, and the party improved from there. Over pizza and cake and ice cream, Noah and Sasha squabbled, in a good-natured way, over whose fault the difficult clues were (Noah had added some false leads without Sasha knowing it).  The other guests pitched in with suggestions for next year, implying that they expect him to throw a mystery party again and that they intend to come to it, so clearly wasn’t a complete disaster.  When the boys were finished eating some of them started playing baseball with a plastic bat and an inflatable Tinkerbell ball, and some of them played a game on Beth’s iPad until their parents came for them.

After the party, Noah opened his presents—a Titanic-themed Wii game, a set of night goggles, a hatch-your-own alien kit, and Lego model of the Eiffel Tower.  We discussed whether it was time to start celebrating his birthdays in a different way—a movie or dinner with a close friend or two perhaps?  We almost took this direction this year, but in the end he’d wanted another shot at the mystery party.

This morning, still thinking about next year, he admitted he wanted to let go of the mystery idea, but he couldn’t seem to do it. I told him how mysteries are inherently chaotic, how many real crimes go unsolved and others are solved only through coincidence and dumb luck.  The only really controlled mystery is a mystery story because the author is in control, I said.  And then I suggested he write a mystery story over the summer if he wanted to have that experience.  June piped up that they should do it together and now, so before breakfast they wrote a page of their mystery story. I don’t know if needing to compromise with a co-author will present him with the same challenges he’s been facing with improvisational actors, but so far it seems to be going well.  I hope it helps him move through this, because there are good ways to go over the cliff, and not so good ones.