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Yet Again Overthinking My Kid’s Birthday Party

“I don’t think we need a theme this year, do we?”

So mused my husband, when he and I were discussing plans for our daughter’s thirteenth birthday party. This is one of those times when I wonder if he’s ever met me. Do we know each other? Of course we need a theme. I love a theme. A theme is a balm to my control enthusiast soul. I have no power over whether people attend a party, or like the food, or enjoy themselves, but I can fucking well ensure that the décor et al revolves around a central motif.

I think I’ve already told you that my daughter expressed enthusiasm for a 90s theme. Which I suggested because her party will involve two of the nineties-est things I can think of: roller skating and a slumber party.

(Yes, yes, I know. Once again, despite my many, many qualms about sleepovers, I have caved to my daughter’s desire for a slumber party. I have no justification for this behavior.)

My recompense is that I get to lean fully into the 90s theme.

Ambiance

I think we will go super simple with the décor, and get a complete set of party supplies. Maybe do some little 90s-themed hanging swirls.

Carla is working on a 90s playlist. I am impressed by her existing repertoire of 90s music! She already knows songs from the Spice Girls, No Doubt, The Offspring, Smash Mouth, and Alanis Morissette, and there are so many fun songs we can add to the mix.

Party Favors

Kids of Carla’s age may be, I suspect, Over It when it comes to gift bags. My preference has usually been to get a single item that we give away to each partygoer – like a book or an anklet or a beach towel. I think there’s a higher chance they will use those things, while a bunch of cheap plastic stuff will end up in the garbage or cluttering up the kids’ houses (and annoying their parents).

This year, I have allowed nostalgia to override my better judgement. Carla found these delightfully tacky boombox favor boxes, and we are going to fill them with an assortment of things I remember fondly from my childhood: mini troll dolls, Koosh balls, jelly bracelets, Warheads, and ring pops.  Carla also wanted to include these key rings, and why not.

My husband suggested getting every kid a Beanie Baby, which is a super fun idea. I let that plan fizzle when I realized I would have to get everyone the exact same Beanie Baby, or figure out which specific variety of Beanie Baby to get and instantly felt overwhelmed. Plus, the ones being sold today are different from the ones we had in the 90s… and I didn’t want to deal with finding “authentic/vintage” versions.

Food

Dinner will be pizza. Carla has requested lemon meringues, with cupcakes for people who don’t like meringues. (I found these darling on-theme cupcake wrappers and toppers.)

I do think that we’ll need some additional food. Listen. I could 100% buy a few bags of chips and some candy and popcorn and let the kids have at it. Probably that is what I will do.

But my let’s-make-things-more-complicated heart wants to – you guessed it – make things more complicated. This mainly derives from my feeling that cheese pizza is not an adequate dinner for a growing child. Did I eat cheese pizza at many a birthday party, let alone for many Friday night dinners, as a kid? Oh yes, so many times. Do I have any qualms whatsoever when my kid goes to a birthday party and the dinner is pizza? Not at all. Is the only reason I can’t say the same for many, many meals as an adult ONLY because I no longer eat plain cheese pizza and prefer pizza to include pepperoni? Very much yes.

Still. Allow me to fantasize about my ideal slumber party menu, okay? And we’ll agree that this won’t happen in real life, and I will lean in to the chips and popcorn thing.

My (fantasy) criteria are: 1) is something Carla likes, 2) includes protein, 3) probably won’t stain my couch/carpet, 4) is cute and/or fun, 5) is nut and dairy free.

Here are the things that fit those criteria:

If I didn’t feel quite as bad about over-sugaring the kids / wasn’t worried about ruining my furniture/house / had attendees who could all eat dairy, I would totally do a hot chocolate bar and some s’mores dip and maybe some sheet pan nachos.

We will also be feeding these teens breakfast. Breakfast is not my area of expertise, so my vote is for donuts. Why, yes, that does directly contradict all my high-and-mighty posturing about “cheese pizza not being good enough.” So perhaps we should make sheet pan pancakes and some scrambled eggs with a side of fruit instead.

Entertainment

While I am still thinking wistfully about the idea of a Taskmaster party, I have resigned myself to reserving that for a future date. After all, the kids will get to roller skate and then (hopefully, weather permitting) swim, and they can always watch movies. Nonetheless, I am of course stressing about how to keep these teens entertained while in my home. I would love to have a few ideas in my pocket, just in case they get bored. I think we can all agree: bored teens pose a danger to themselves and others.

Carla specifically wants to play a game called either “pass the parcel” or “saran ball game.” My understanding of this game is that we choose a variety of tiny prizes (lip balms, stickers, scrunchies, candy) and wrap each prize in a bunch of saran wrap. Then each kid has a set amount of time to free a prize without ripping the saran wrap before passing the parcel to the next kid. The big challenge, I think, will be choosing prizes that are simultaneously fun enough to keep the kids occupied, silly enough that someone who doesn’t get a prize doesn’t feel too upset, and inexpensive enough that I don’t need to resort to selling feet pictures to pay for the party. In the “pass the parcel” version of this game, or so Carla informs me, there is a Big Prize in the very center of the layers of wrapping; she does not want that, because it feels unfair. But it also seems as though there’s no guarantee that a person will get a prize during their turn anyway, so I’m not sure how “fair” the game is. In any case, it might be fun to have a couple of slightly higher-end prizes in the sticker/scrunchie mix – perhaps a World’s Smallest Care Bear or Slinky??? Or maybe a gift card to an ice cream shop or Five Below?

I also think that having a photo scavenger hunt could be potentially fun. (This is a leftover from my Taskmaster fantasizing.)  But maybe that can be a spur-of-the-moment option that I can offer if the kids are bored by everything else. Don’t worry; I will overthink it into oblivion just in case.

As I mentioned earlier, movies are a great, classic option for keeping the kids busy, too. I do tend to fret about WHICH movies they will want to watch. Carla’s friends occupy both ends of the “I’ve seen everything up and including Squid Games” and “I still mainly watch Disney movies” spectrum, so I feel a little uneasy about leaving the choice to them. Carla and I had a little chat about it, and she thinks that she can guide the options a bit, so that no one is going to be forced into watching, like, Midsommar or, I don’t know, Eyes Wide Shut.

Since I am, as stated, obsessed with a theme, I of course would vote for 90s classics. Clueless and Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Of course, most of the 90s classics I think of as fun and harmless have aged poorly, I’m looking at you Austin Powers.

Here is the point at which you kindly, gently overlook my latest birthday party related bout of insanity, and instead tell me:

  • What are the best slumber party foods?
  • Which 90s songs MUST go on the playlist?
  • Which 90s movies MUST the teens watch?
  • What are the best slumber party games?
  • What am I forgetting, besides the undeniable fact that the teens will do whatever they want and I really have no say at all?
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Friday Randomosity: December Backslide and Some Festive Stuff As Well

December, for all its holiday magic, has been less ideal in other ways. I feel like I’ve lost any and all (admittedly questionable) momentum I’ve built at any point in the year. Maybe it’s been channeled into stamping, licking, and addressing a million holiday cards, I don’t know.

On the holiday end of things, I am, of course, doing my Last Minute Panic about gifts. My husband and I bought my kid’s one and only Hanukkah gift on the afternoon of the first night of Hanukkah, and then wrapped it quickly while she was getting the candles set up in the menorah. (And then it was the wrong size, so I added “exchange pajamas” to my holiday to-do list the other day and the same jammies were not available in store or online in Carla’s size, so I ended up getting her some Snoopy Valentine’s Day ones.) (They are SO SOFT but they don’t match the socks we got her, which are no longer available online.) (Oooh, I didn’t see that they have Hanukkah socks!)

The stocking stuffers seemed unbalanced, so I got my dad these engraving pens to go with his spicy peanuts, but I also added a tube of hand cream because I noticed his hands were so dry the last time I saw him, which meant that he had five items for his stocking and everyone else had only three… and then I got my mom these watercolor pens to even it out a little, and then I threw in a pizza server because I have a problem. And then I found myself in an Urban Outfitters and ended up buying these socks for my mom. Of course, NOW I feel like my husband’s stocking is going to be the emptiest but I am out of ideas, and, I think, out of time. And also THIS IS SO DUMB WHY DO I DO THIS EVERY YEAR.

(My husband, who is usually The Voice of Reason, did text me yesterday about another gift for the cat, so at least I’m not the only one who goes a little insane this time of year.)

I am getting distracted. Oh yes, I was about to list my failings as a human this month, above and beyond the regular.

Let’s see. I don’t think I’ve walked outside more than handful of times since Elisabeth stopped holding my hand.

After NaBloPoMo ended, and San and crew stopped holding my hand for that, I have pretty much abandoned my book blog once again. And listen, I know it probably makes zero sense to you why I even have a separate whole blog just for discussing books, but it makes sense to me and I am currently choosing to be stubborn about it. Which means, apparently, neglect.

While moving an armchair to make space for the Christmas tree on December 1, I borked my back and haven’t worked out since. For a few days, I walked slowly on the treadmill to at least get some sort of movement into my days, and then that practice became covered in piles of snow and shipping boxes like everything else.

Yes, I have completed (COMPLETED, hear that, Suzanne????) my gift buying, but I only just got the last couple of gifts for out-of-towners in the mail yesterday. Hopefully they will arrive on time. I STILL have yet to get some of the holiday cards in the mail, AND I under-ordered so some people are getting cards from Trader Joe’s and Aldi – which are, to be fair, very cute. If you send holiday cards, and some of those cards go to other bloggers, do you send out different cards to each set of people? I kind of like the idea of having a special set of cards just for blog friends, but I barely got one holiday card ordered in time this year so perhaps that’s an idea for Future Me.

I do have tiers of recipients, though. No, “tiers” is not the right word; that implies a hierarchy, and this is not a matter of A List, B List, etc. My card recipients diverge along different information branches, maybe??? Like, this year I printed out a mini-Christmas letter that I stuck in the envelopes of people who I thought would actually care about the minutiae of my family’s year. Mainly that consists of my aunts and uncles and a few of the residents of our old neighborhood. I did not think that the handful of my husband’s high school friends with whom we exchange cards would miss such a letter, nor would any of the families of Carla’s classmates or my old coworkers. People in my inner circle already KNOW all the stuff in the letter, so it felt redundant to include it and I didn’t, but I feel sort of bad about that. Am I overthinking this? I am overthinking this.

Sleep continues to be a huge pain in the ass. I am managing to use my CPAP approximately four hours a night, but I have been more aware of it lately and more likely to rip it off my face in the middle of the night. Also, through ALL of November, I woke up at 4:30 every morning. Did I exercise in that “extra” time as I had planned? No, I did not; I wrote blog posts. BUT, I was pretty excited to have adjusted my wake-up time so easily. In December, I slid inexplicably back to waking up at 5:30. And then there have been a few mornings where I’ve slept until close to seven! It feels decadent but a) I’m not getting GOOD sleep during those extra hours and b) I don’t have enough time in the day as it is and c) I STILL manage to be a floppy tired mess by nine pm, regardless of when I wake up.

The cat continues to be Extremely Fluffy. When we brought him home, the cat breeder noted that he will have two “shed” events each year – once in the spring and once in the fall – but I am beginning to believe his whole life is a shed event. He does that adorable / alarming cat thing where he’ll be sitting or resting contentedly and then will suddenly leap into action, and each time he leaves a puff of fur in his wake, Looney-Tunes-style. I brush the beast daily – sometimes multiple times daily – and yet I am constantly picking up little tumbleweeds of fluff that decorate our dark floors like some ephemeral species of flora.

“Meowp, meowp!”

Seriously. There is fur everywhere at all times. I will vacuum the floors and then a little puff of fluff will drift down gently from the sky where apparently even the air is participating in a shed event. Even though I looked at them with great interest, I did not buy myself the laundry pet hair removers or the little purse lint remover. And yet as the days pass, I grow more and more aware of how completely covered in cat hair I am. Maybe there’s still time?

My beloved housecleaner is pregnant, and admitted the other day that she’s been suffering from morning sickness. While she has been my housecleaner for nearly a decade now, and therefore probably knows me better than anyone on the planet, we have a fairly distant relationship. Not cold or anything, but professional, which feels right and fine. But now that she’s pregnant, I feel SO BAD FOR HER. As someone who suffered from intense morning sickness for most of my pregnancy, I cannot imagine, say, CLEANING TOILETS. And yet, I don’t want to infantilize her or pathologize her totally normal condition by saying “no need to clean toilets for the next seven months.” The best I could come up with was say, please let me know if you need any accommodations, and please do only what you can do. I really hope she will speak up if she feels like something is too much for her. (Obviously, I recognize that she might be totally fine and happy to work as she normally does and I don’t want to over-emphasize something in a way that feels demeaning or sexist!)

Do you remember the palm plants I bought earlier this year for our sunroom?

They were glorious when we first got them!

I brought them inside earlier this month, once the cold started to hit, and THEY TRIED TO PERISH. Like, one day they were flourishing and the next day they were all brown and crispy. It was Quite Alarming, especially because they were Quite Expensive. I did some googling, and I took three immediate actions: 1.) I moved them into a slightly sunnier place. 2.) I hacked off all the dead portions, which left a bunch of stalks and a couple of sickly green shoots. 3.) I heaved them into my sink and let them soak in water for 15 minutes, to re-hydrate the root ball. Then I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. Okay, I also bought some fertilizer specific to palms and ferns and fed the plants accordingly. And then I got a teeny little humidifier and have been humidifying the plants for a few hours each day. They look… well, they still look terrible, but they look much better than they did when they first alerted me to their imminent demise.

Green and perky, with some new growth.
I think the tallest stalk, which seemed to be hanging in there, needs to go. It no longer seems to be among the living.

Speaking of plants: my husband occasionally buys me flowers for our anniversary. This year, not wanting to assume either way, I gently reminded him that most flowers are toxic to cats, and our cat has not got that memo and likes to chew on any and all plants in his realm. On our anniversary, my husband came home with this – and then put it together for me. The “putting it together” was a little gift for him, and the permanent non-toxic flowers were a little gift for me.

Leo is Not Allowed On The Table, and yet no matter where I stood or how often I deposited him onto the floor, he was CERTAIN that I was trying to photograph him. (The plants in the tiny pots are teacher gifts and only temporary, lest you are worried for Leo’s safety.)

How is everyone feeling in your household? We keep getting ominous emails from Carla’s school, listing the number of students who have reported influenza diagnoses. First email about one kid on Tuesday. Second email about two more kids on Wednesday. Third email (also on Wednesday) about four other kids. No emails yesterday, but then this morning Carla cheerfully told me that lots of her friends were out with “the barfing sickness.” Well. She only has a class event, a schoolwide talent show, a birthday party, and a sleepover one more day of school to survive and then she’s on break, so I’m sure we’re in the clear!

Okay, that may be the limit of my Non-Holiday content at the moment. I am really just steeped in Holiday Mode, you know? One thing I have not done – or even really thought about – is bake any sort of cookies. Maybe now that I’ve got gifts figured out (YOU ARE DONE SHOPPING, SUZANNE) (except maybe for something else small for my husband’s stocking?????) I can turn my attention to baking. I’m not really in the mood to do a cookie plate this year, but I do have a hankering for some big, soft molasses cookies. I would be making them right now, in fact, except I am out of both ginger and cinnamon.          

Maybe baking cookies will be an item on my Winter Break To-Do List? My kid is going to be off school for fifteen days, and my husband is taking nearly two full weeks off, and I am giddy with the idea of so much time together. However, I know that two weeks could easily go the way of each of us zoning out in front of our separate screens, which would feel wasteful and depressing to me. To head off this potential issue, I am trying to encourage my family to come up with a real list of things that we want to do during the break, fun things and work things, together things and separate things. So far, we have “try special sundae at local ice creamery” and “make ice cream” on the list. (My in-laws got us a Ninja Creami for our anniversary, and we want to break it in.) We should probably have some non-ice-cream to-dos as well, and I would like to exercise and write every day, have at least one family game night, clean my kid’s craft room, and put up a gallery wall. (Yes, I am still trying to get my gallery wall after all these years.) It would be nice to do something outside and to do something with my parents and possibly something with friends or neighbors, but it may be overly ambitious to include other people in our winter break plans. I also have this vague idea that I want to organize some of the drawers and cupboards that have gotten a little out of control, but… that’s not urgent.

I got a delightful surprise in the mail yesterday. It’s an ornament from my childhood best friend, featuring quotes from one of our shared favorite movies. We used to drive around listening to the Clueless soundtrack together and we have watched the movie, together and separately, about a million times. It was SUCH a fun treat to open and then hang on the tree.

Okay, I’ve said all the things. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and that any and all ongoing holiday prep goes smoothly.

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Weigh In Wednesday on a Thursday: Current Identity Crisis

Lately I’ve been feeling like I’ve outgrown this space. Which isn’t to say I have any real desire or intention to stop blogging. It just feels like I don’t know what to post, that anything I do write is inconsequential or boring or dumb or… I don’t know. 

I’ve also begun to dislike, more and more, my blog name. It fit me once, a long time ago. But I no longer feel like my identity is Doctor’s Wife, nor do I think my life is any different from anyone else’s, nor do I write a whole lot about the doctor’s-wife-specific aspects of my life anyway, and it just feels dumb and stale and cringe. 

One of the most memorable – and most sobering / terrifying – quotes I’ve come across is Annie Dillard’s “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” If I look at my blog archive as a catalog of how I spend my life, it’s full of posts about parenting, relationships, food, my cat, worries / anxiety, and day-to-day minutiae.

The things I write about here are topics that interest me. But do they add up to anything???? Sometimes the silly and frivolous things I post about feel so very silly and frivolous. Am I wasting my time, and yours, by dwelling on such inconsequential topics?

I want to write about deeper, heavier themes. And yet, many of them feel outside of my ability to discuss with any nuance or intelligence; many feel too personal, or too revealing of the private lives of people who aren’t me; many feel so heavy I fear I’ll drag us all down (and we have enough of that, elsewhere). 

More and more often, lately, I find myself thinking, What am I doing here? 

  • I write for this blog because I believe in the practice of writing. But shouldn’t I be devoting time and energy to my other writing, the writing that I’m neglecting all too often? 
  • I write for this blog because I love keeping a sort of loose record of my life. But isn’t it far too loose, when I’m barely delving into anything real? Will I revisit this in twenty years and think – my god, was my whole life really wrapped up in coming up with meals to make for my family???? Would Future Me be better served by writing a private, messy, no-details-spared journal?
  • I write here because I love interacting with you. But couldn’t I get the same feeling of connection by reading and commenting on your posts (which I do far too infrequently, let’s add that to my list of failings), or texting / emailing / calling you more often? 

It all comes back around to the simple problem that I’ve outgrown the “life of a doctor’s wife” conceit. If I find a focus or a point or a perspective, I could imbue my writing with fresh purpose. But… what would my focus be? I have no specialty or expertise, no original wisdom to share, no unique viewpoints, no secrets to offer. Even if I changed my blog identity, I would still be the same over-anxious, often-cranky, germ-averse, self-absorbed, quick-to-catastrophize, food-and-cat-obsessed middle-aged me. And, to be honest, even if I did have some area of expertise, I don’t know if I would WANT to write an “XYZ advice” blog, you know? I don’t necessarily want to be locked into one thing. I kind of like having a place where I can moon about my child growing up or discuss my dinner plans for the week or overthink gift ideas. If I were to suddenly to be The XYZ Blog, would I still feel able to post those things?

Speaking of focus, I already have a profoundly neglected book blog. Maybe I should shift all my energy to writing about books and writing. I love books! I love writing! Maybe writing about books and writing would mean I’d read more! And write more! But do I really have anything revelatory or interesting to say about the books I read? Could I write anything about writing except that I am very, very slow and mediocre at it? Plus… the book blog is “public” in a way this one isn’t, and I don’t feel entirely free to be me there. (And what does THAT say about me, that I feel more open when I am semi-anonymous than when people I know offline might be reading?) (And have things become extra complicated, now that I know several bloggers in my offline life, too?) 

Now that I have so many lovely “real life” connections, do I even need this blog anymore? It was a lifeline when I was a lonely newlywed, working from home in a new city while my husband was at the hospital all hours of the day. Many of those connections have grown and lasted and crossed over into offline friendships, and wasn’t that the hope all along? Have I achieved a goal, making the ongoing pursuit of that same goal superfluous? After all, I can continue to read YOUR blog, even if I stop posting on mine.

If I reverted to “just” a blog reader, would that feel like enough? Would I magically shift all the time I spend writing blog posts toward other, more valuable pursuits? Somehow I think I would still itch to get all the random silly mundane frivolous cranky food-and-cat-related thoughts out of my head.

But if I feel driven to do that anyway, why not share those random thoughts with kind people who will empathize and offer insights and make me laugh? 

As you see, I continue to travel in circles. 

Okay. Let’s see here. Is there anything concrete we can derive from today’s post? If you haven’t already clicked away from this drivel, perhaps you could weigh in on my current identity crisis by answering the following polls.

Well, that’s it. That’s the dumb post that’s been stopping me up, writing wise. If you made it through this meandering, whiny, naval-gaze of a post, I salute you. (And believe it or not, I cut 500 of the dumbest, whiniest words from it.) I hope posting it here allows me to move on.

Thanks, as always, for reading and understanding and weighing in.