Happy Birthday, Ethan!

Today was Ethan's party. It went pretty good. Had one no-show and one non-responder; 2 sets of parents stayed. The last kid is still here, but she was Kyra's friend assigned to kid wrangling, and she arrived late, so no biggie.

The lightsabers were a big hit, as were the inflatable ones for the little sisters. 2 kids took us up on the offer to wear a costume, so we had a storm trooper and a jedi knight.

I'm very disappointed to say that the cake looked fine despite being custom-designed. Yes, that is a strange comment, so I'll qualify it. Ever since I discovered the Cake Wrecks blog, I've been scheming for a situation where I can trick a decorator into messing up our cake order so I could send the resulting hilarious photos to Cake Wrecks. This even seemed tailor made for such a screw up, considering the bakery did not have a Star Wars-themed cake on hand. They did have a Darth Vader head (and as it turns out also an Anakin Skywalker head) so we agreed on Vader on top of a Star Trek cake. I was rather hoping it would be horrible. As it is, there were some inexplicable orange swoops surrounding Vader. Not sure what they represent, but not really that funny either. I'm sending a picture in anyway because you can never tell.

Danya wields her lightsaber while sharing a bean bag with Alba.

Ethan's new Luke Skywalker costume was cool but a bit big (hence the missing arm?? Not sure what he was doing here....)

OK, I'm not sure what the scenario in his mind was, but Ethan penned 2 notes imploring some cat to not...do some dire thing. It puts to mind a cat holding a .45, perhaps, but with what opposable thumb and how is he standing up?? Not sure, but it's kind of funny...

Horrible? No, horriblay!

What a dedicated mom I am, sacrificing myself to the fast food gods in order to provide "quality" entertainment to my kids. And of course, being sleepy, I didn't order my usual bottle of water but one of the fancy new coffee drinks from a certain McFastFood place. Let me just say this: OMG, this is sweet and somewhat disgusting. I got the iced mocha with hazelnut syrup and it is way too sweet, and has whipped cream and chocolate syrup drizzles, which go through the straw in chunks. Mmmmmm! At least Kyra likes it (and I'm not sure what that means exactly...)

My babies are growing up!

Ethan finally gets to ditch his 3-wheeler for a 2-wheeler (er...4-wheeler for now!)

Kyra sports a girlie hairstyle...until the ponytail started cutting off the circulation to her brain and giving her a headache. Oh well....

Lightsaber envy??

Hmmm.... Star Wars figures prominently on all of Ethan's activities lately.

Oh for a better camera (or a better photographer!)

In this age of Photoshop, I really should be embarrassed about the quality of this shot. Oddly enough, I am not. I guess it's borderline acceptable for the kids to shoot each other in theory rather than practice (and the darts stick to the glass better than to the kids anyway!) Ethan thought it was really funny to group shots around his sister's "privates", but I  nipped that in the bud by not taking pictures of that (and there are so many things wrong with that sentence...)

Paging Sally Miller....

Well I can't say it was a wasted day, but here it is coming on 4 in the afternoon and I have not gotten anything personal done. I have dealt with house stuff all day. First thing off was our installation appointment with Directv: yay, we have DVR now! But that took 4 hours (and it's not even complete: Jason damaged a cord for the internet downstairs and has to finish that piece of it). Next, now that that was a done deal, I called to cancel cable and add digital phone to our Comcast account. Once that was done I got to call our phone provider and ask them what the hell this new fee of $15 was for and who ordered it. And that's where it got weird.

Turns out Sally Miller ordered some voice mail via the internet service and added it onto our phone number. Hmmm... So how does that work?? Our number is public, not unlisted, and we have had it for almost 10 years now. Wouldn't you think they'd check? I'm really baffled. Thankfully I noticed this right away because I had a limit on how much my auto payment would fork over, and this new fee tripped that alarm, as it were. Now I don't know if this was a simple typo or some kind of a scam or identity theft in bloom. Kind of freaked out.

Odd coincidence is my daughter's computer identity is Sally Porcupine. On the off chance she accidentally signed up, still: how the hell would that happen. She clearly does not sound like anything other than a kid on the phone. Very weird.

Now I'm going to play with my new toy until Kyra gets home. I was making fast progress on my current quilt, but that was nipped in the bud with the arrival of my new TV toy. Sigh. Tomorrow is another day, and I have a week until the birthday party, so no worries.