Thing 2 turns 6

We celebrated Thing 2’s birthday, an event which deserves an entry.

Long ago, last May, when I figured out we wouldn’t be attending the end of the year school bounce party festival, my Sis-in-law mentioned Kangaroo Zoo, which is a big bounce house place up by them, about 20 minutes away from us. I made plans to take the girls there, in compensation for missing the party while we were in Vegas.
Of course we didn’t get out there.

But later Thing 2 got invited to a birthday party there and we got to check it out. It is really nice, in my opinion better than the other bounce house option in town.

She had so much fun Thing 2 agreed to have her “friend” birthday party there.

But first, for her REAL birthday, we went to my brother’s office and watched the 24th of July parade from the window of his office with his family. Halfway through Thing 1 got bored and asked if she could play her DS, which she brought with her. She plays that darned thing way too much… but that’s another story. After the parade, my folks came over and took Thing 2 and Thing 1 to lunch at Thing 2’s lunch place of choice, McDonalds. I stayed home and slept, as I was still in the throes of that nasty cold. Later they watched the kids again while Hubby and I went to dinner as a celebration for his birthday - only one month behind his real birthday. That's probably a record for us!
We had Thing 2’s official birthday party with the family on Sunday evening. She wanted Spaghetti, and raw cauliflower. Those where her requests. It was a really nice party, we ate inside because it was so hot, and just angled the swamp cooler over the heads of the people in the kitchen.

The following Saturday, August 1st, we had Thing 2’s friend party at Kangaroo Zoo. We probably could have squeezed it in the 25th of July, but since we just got back from Jackson the 19th, it didn’t seem like much time to get everything ready, and we’d also heard some of Thing 2’s favorite people would be out of town for the 24th. So we went with August 1st.
There is a little girl at church who Thing 2 plays with sometimes, we'll call her Eeyore. Saturdays her big sisters watch her while her folks have other commitments, and if we do anything with Eeyore, we have to pick her up. The disadvantage of course is that she's there, miserable, until the end of the party. So I picked up Eeyore and we headed to the bounce house. I had worried that Eeyore might be a problem because she is notoriously unhappy about anything and everything, and being in a situation like this where she's a year younger than everyone sounds like trouble to me. And sure enough, we had barely got our shoes off when Eeyore started moping. Of course there were a bunch of other kids there that Thing 2 knew from school, and she wanted to play with them. Eeyore was the youngest, didn’t know anyone but one other little girl from church, and quickly decided to be absolutely miserable. She spent 90% of the party moping, crying, sniffling, and shuffling around at foot of the slides. The slides were too scary. They were too big. Everything was too scary. But the one slide which she liked that she refused to go on herself. The other 10% of the time when she wasn’t acting clinically depressed is when either I or the mother of one of the other party guests was playing directly with her. But of course that gets old quick, I had to take pictures, and the other kid's moms wanted to play with their own kids too. But with Eeyore there’s just no fixing anything, there’s no cheering up, just maybe a slight lessening of the despair.

If you ask Thing 2 now about her party, she says it was fun, but that it was bad that Eeyore was so unhappy. As we were writing our thank-you notes, she said she didn’t know what to say to Eeyore. She didn’t want to remind Eeyore of the party at all because she seemed so miserable at it. Thing 2 bemoaned she didn’t get to play much with anyone, because she had been trying so hard to play with EVERYONE, and keep everyone entertained. My niece went off to play with Thing 1 the minute she arrived, so Thing 2 hardly saw either of them. She didn’t get to play with the one little boy who came, who is a real sweetie, since everyone else was so needy.

It was a party that was easy for me, since I didn’t have to do much more than arrange it and make cupcakes, then take pictures. But for Thing 2, having that many people running in different directions to entertain, I think it wasn’t as much fun for her as a party at the house, with half as many people, would have been.