Happy birthday Rachel!

We decided to have an early birthday celebration for Rachel at Drew's suggestion, and today was the day. Planning for it has added a major amount of stress to my already stressed-out life, so I was relieved to have her party day finally arrive.

Rachel insisted on holding it at the Southwest Community Center, which has a nice gym area and pool, which is more of a water park than a swim area. I ordered a cake (would have made one, except there were around 20 people, adults and kids, who came, and I don't have the culinary skills to bake for so many) from a wonderful bakery near our house -- strawberry frosted chocolate cake with strawberry cream filling -- and Disney princesses on top. Priceless was Rachel's reaction at the bakery when we picked it up: "Oh, MOMMY! ThankyouThankyouThankyou for getting me a cake with DISNEY PRINCESSES!" All the little old ladies who work at the bakery gathered around to watch Rachel's reaction and they were totally delighted. Luckily I had help from a friend, Sarah, who brought juice boxes and snacks. Rachel and I raced through a party store this morning, grabbing stuff for gift bags that I assembled at the bakery, as well as cups, plates, forks, etc. Then it was on to swim lessons, where I ran into a woman named Angela who used to work at the Oregonian with me years ago; our kids are apparently in the same swim class and are around the same age; I remember that Angela and I compared pregnancies way back when. Good thing she remembered me because I had no idea who she was.

After swim lessons we headed to the farmer's market, where I suddenly realized I had no matches for the cake and wondered if SWCC had a knife to cut the cake, so I called them, and when I hung up the phone Rachel could see I was distressed. She put down her slice of pizza and crawled into my lap.

"I just want to make everything perfect for you," I said.
"You're the best mommy in the whole world," she replied.
"What makes me the best mommy?" I said.
"Because you try to make everything perfect," she said. "But everything doesn't have to be perfect. It's good enough as it is."

WISDOM. From a kid.

Anyway, then we went to the community center, where they had set up things to play with in the gym. Rachel managed to injure herself not once, not twice, but five times in the space of 18 minutes (twisted her ankle on the mats, fell over on the tricycle, fell off the scooter twice, and a fifth thing that I can't remember). The two teenage "helpers" assigned to the gym and the party were completely useless. But Rachel remained pretty cheerful, limping along on her tender ankle, like an 80-year-old woman, and I had a nice time chatting with the parents. At the end we all played the "parachute game" where we grabbed the edges of a parachute and waved it up and down while the kids ran under it. Unexpectedly cool, so much so that I and another parent agreed we should buy a parachute and have the kids over and the parents would drink wine while we waved it up and down.

At the actual party, Rachel got three Barbies (because one isn't enough, evidently), a cool construction game for girls, a Barbie computer, etc. She insisted on distributing the gift bags herself ("to thank my friends for singing to me") AND passing out slices of cake. Really, it was astonishing.

And the best part was the parents thanked me profusely for such a nice afternoon and a few said, "well done! We could never do this; we're not organized enough."

And then we went home and I crashed for an hour while Rachel played with her toys, went back to the computer store because I loathe loathe loathe the computer and the Windows operating system I bought and I needed tech help but Macs are too expensive; and then we had a late dinner and I put Rachel to bed.

Hopefully she will have some happy memories.