Over in my review blog, I reviewed a great game for young kids called Jump Start World, which I received courtesy of Parent Bloggers Network. Feel free to check out what I thought if you’re in the market for a fun game that helps your kids learn at the same time.

The great thing about a party is the obvious chance to hang out with friends and, in this case, see the kids having fun together. Today, though, I got to enjoy the three best things about the day AFTER the party:

1. Sleeping in. When we have a late night, it means we get to enjoy sleeping later than normal. Today it was about 9:45*. Ahh.
2. The clean home. Because if I go to the trouble of maniacally cleaning everything up the day of the actual party, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it all slide the day after. The day that follows a party, I usually clean everything up to the point of looking just like it did five minutes before guests arrived. Then I get to sit and enjoy a clean, orderly home for the rest of the day.
3. The food. My biggest fear when I throw a party is that I will not have enough food to feed everyone. As a result we go overboard and get more than we need. I had made two big lasagnas, plus we had chicken nuggets, two kinds of battered cheese puffs, different pates, cheeses, crackers, bread sticks, chips, pretzels, vegetable platter, fruit platter, and two cakes. We had a ton left over. I love the day after a party because I have a load of food to munch on throughout the day. For lunch I ate about 25 pounds of cheese with crispy breadsticks and that was awesome.

Now I just have to get to bed so I can stop feeling so tired.

*Sleeping in ended up biting us in the ass though. Breanna was tired enough that she was asleep by 8:45 (not to mention the fact that she fell asleep in her little chair at 2:30 this afternoon). Hayley, however, was still awake at 10:30. I’m too afraid to go see if she’s asleep yet because I might cry if she is.

After Breanna’s birthday party today I realize I must be getting old. Once upon a time I could party it up until the wee hours with no trouble at all. For years now, we’ve always combined kids’ parties with adults getting together too, since we’re all one big group of friends with kids of similar ages.

Tonight, Breanna is in bed sleeping, Hayley is in bed trying to avoid sleep, most people are gone, and only a few of George’s friends remain. I could swear that it’s midnight at least and it’s not even 11 pm yet. Although part of me wants to crawl into bed, I think I’ll make a cup of tea, eat a slice of the Caillou cake I made, clean up a few last things, and then hit the pillow.

Plenty of pictures will be on the way at some point, but first I must sleep to recover from my little one’s party!

(I’m participating in Holidailies, an entry a day throughout December with occasional time off due to holidays if necessary, so if an entry a day in November wasn’t enough, now you get even more.)

Today is the last day of NaBloPoMo, where many bloggers posted daily throughout November. It’s been a lot of fun even though there have been occasions where I’ve been stricken with “augh, what do I write?” panic, wherein I beg George to give me an idea of something to write about (hint: he is not helpful at all). However, mostly I did okay without having to stretch too hard.

And so naturally, I went and signed up for Holidailies which covers posting throughout the month of December. I may just run out of steam with that one but I’ve done it every year, so I have to at least try. Also, because of the holidays you are allowed to miss a few days here and there if you need to.

Still, if I suddenly implode from a lack of things to write about, I may just join Jessica with her idea of 31 Days of Nothing instead.

Breanna’s birthday may have been last week but her birthday party is going to be this Saturday, so in between the eight thousand other things, I’ve been slowly preparing for it. Tonight I completed phase one by getting some of the things I absolutely need for tomorrow. That meant going to the grocery store for the ingredients for the two big lasagnas I’ll be making (ground beef, sauce, tomato paste, cottage cheese, a big old block of cheese for grating, sliced olives (yes, olives), and vegetables) and the stuff I need for the cake.

I’m thinking of doing a Caillou cake since Breanna loves that whiney little twit Caillou very much. It’s not like it would be hard – bake the two round layers, stack them, tint the white icing with a few drops of red to make it Caillou’s peach-pink skin tone, and then use some of the tube icing I bought to draw the outline and the facial features. I mean, he’s not exactly a complex character to draw, it’s not like trying to freehand draw Dora or Uniqua with icing. We’ll see. My back up is always the ladybug or butterfly cake, but Caillou would be something different.

I really wanted to make this castle cake and it doesn’t even look overly complicated but I’m already stressed out about other things so I don’t think I should try anything that has even a remote possibility of raising my blood pressure in any way.

Tomorrow, in between work stuff, housework, taking care of two kids, and trying to eat/pee/breathe, I’ll make the sauce for the lasagna, assemble it, bake it, and stick it in the fridge to be reheated on Saturday. Then I’ll try to get the cake done in the afternoon so I can ice it and decorate it in the evening after the kids go to bed. I always like to try to get the cake fully done the night before because I always figure that if I screw it up in some way I can have a little hissy fit, throw it across the room and into the garbage (or possibly off the balcony) and then ask George to get me new supplies and I’ll still have Saturday morning to do it. It’s always good to have a plan.

I don’t know why I get so stressed about these parties, they’re always fun and everyone enjoys themselves, and I’ve never once had any kind of disaster involving food poisoning, running out of food so that everyone is starving and has to order pizza, or stoves catching on fire. Also, not one guest has ever shown up with white gloves, ready to run a finger along all my furniture to check how well I dusted. And my floor is always sparkling clean until the first three or four guests arrive and then you’d never know I had even washed it once in the seven years we’ve been here. So I have no reason to get frazzled but I do. I freak out and rush around and worry and then people arrive, I have my first glass of red wine, and everything is fine.

Now to make my to-do list with all 1575 things I need to accomplish by 4 pm Saturday…

I can’t tell you how badly I need a Sock Zombie. That is ridiculously cute.

Hayley has paid for things before today. If she comes to the store with me, I usually give her the money to give to the cashier. If we order some food on occasion, I’ll let her pay the delivery guy and then show her how much to give for a tip. She’s also spent her own money before. She had gotten some money for her birthday and she used it to buy the Go Diego Go Animal Rescue Center (or whatever the heck it’s called).

However, she’s always had us there with her. Today, though, she had a Scholastic book fair at school and we sent $15 with her to pick out her own stuff which was a difference from sitting down with me at the table with a flyer to choose some to order.

I spoke briefly to the teacher after school (Breanna is crazy about her so at least once a week I have to take her to see the teacher or Breanna gets testy) and apparently there was a book with Hayley’s name in the title that she wanted but she was two bucks short, but she didn’t seem too disappointed and she was eager to show me what she got.

I was a little worried because I had read Heather’s entry about how there was an awful lot of non-book toys of a crappy nature, and I wondered if she’d picked some of those. I had decided to show her I was proud of how she had made her own choices and paid herself, but I was seriously hoping she hadn’t gotten some sort of junk.

I was pleased to find out she had picked out two My Little Pony books for five bucks each and she spent the remaining five on a little set that contained a few fancy pencils, some erasers, and a sticky note pad. I was really okay with the last purchase because although it wasn’t books, it wasn’t garbage either and it’s something she can use when we do her homework over this long weekend.

Having my daughter come home with things she bought all on her own (obviously with a bit of help, mind you) made me realize once again how big she’s getting.

It’s a long weekend because it’s the end of term; they got their report cards and Hayley did really well. They mentioned a few things she can work on together at home but pretty much everything was great in all sections (physical development, social, communication, understanding, etc.).

How is my first born baby big enough for book fairs and report cards?!

There will be another entry up later today (or this evening), but in the meantime, I was lucky enough to receive a complimentary Spark Talking Telescope from the Discovery Store and I have posted a review of it up in my review blog.

After I got Hayley off to school, I set about doing a few necessities, such as tidying up and getting a bit of work out of the way because I knew that once my friend dropped her baby off, I wasn’t going to be doing anything other than taking care of him and of Breanna.

I was really looking forward to hanging out with a wee baby again but the one thing I was worried about was that Breanna would be jealous. She loved him well enough the other times she saw him but I wondered if she would start freaking out when she saw me holding a baby in her home instead of holding her. She’s two, after all, and very tempermental (you should see the hilarious picture I have of her from this evening when she had a little tantrum – how DARE I say she can’t have another cookie?! – and then threw herself down on the floor in a very dramatic “woe is me” pose), so I was almost expecting the worst after she realized it was just the three of us.

Much to my surprise, she was not only fine, she had a great time. In fact, I was right that she was jealous but not because I wasn’t holding her. She was jealous because she wanted to hold the baby herself. She kept putting her arms out to him and imploring, “I hold! I hold him! Me! My turn!” I got her to sit beside me on the couch and I helped her hold him (I still mostly had him but he was halfway on her lap too) and she postively beamed as she sat there, so pleased with herself for holding a baby.

She hugged him and kissed his forehead, she helped me rub his back when he needed to burp and she patted his arm when he was crying because I was preparing his bottle. At one point I put him in his car seat while he dozed so I could get her some paper to draw on and she sat beside us on the floor and tried to give him her Elmo to hold (“Baby! Here Elmo!”).

It was overwhelmingly cute. I’m sure if he was a permanent fixture she would quickly get over being enthralled but she sure did love him today. Her birthday party is on this coming Saturday and I know she’s going to be so excited when she sees him again in just a few more days.

(NO, she is NOT getting a baby brother OR sister, so hush!)

Tomorrow I am expecting to be completely useless. Aside from the fact that I never go to bed early enough and I have to get up at 6:30 to get Hayley ready for bed, I’m usually tired so mornings are a challenge anyway as far as feeling productive. Lately I’ve been doing a pretty good job of getting a lot done before Breanna’s nap time but not always.

But tomorrow I will be even more useless than ever as I relive the days of two years and five years ago. Friends of ours just had their second baby and due to a doctor’s appointment, she asked me if I could babysit for just a couple of hours.

How much actual productive work do you think will be going on tomorrow morning when I have one very cute toddler and one very cute baby in my midst? (Hayley is downright peeved that she has to go to school when a baby is coming over. She really wanted to stay home.)

Yeah right, there will be plenty of lullabies and rocking and snuggling and oohing and ahhing, but very little productive stuff beyond that.

God I miss being unproductive for a very good reason!