Lovelihood

Our reward for a couple weeks hard at work on various goodies for Boy and school chums was an afternoon spent partaking in a sweet birthday rite done in understated Montessori form. Something about circling a calendar while carrying a globe and there being 52 weeks in a year. It's sweet, trust me. And then there was the solid 40 minutes of little kids enthusiastically sniffing, rolling out, shape-pressing wads of goodie bag play dough, the littlest children eager to show off to any available adult the latest animal-shaped cut. The camera, of course, was safe at home while all this was happening, and wasn't brought until the end of the night, as we were cleaning up from our own private blowing out of the candles at the dining table.

Our favorite little jar, some-time baker of cakes and storer of baby food, can now add "keeper of play dough" to its diverse little resume. The final installment of things to make for the goodie bags is finally behind us. All that's left is to schlep all the loot to school.

It could have been a little warmer, but days as sunny as today were made for taking the two-block walk to the playground, and dragging the camera with us on the off-chance the kids might deign to play close enough to each other to be caught in a single frame together. And look at all happy about the fact. It will happen.

I was already running late leaving work last night when I remembered that I needed to get a laser printout of this year's official birthday design to burn onto one of the stockpiled Gocco screens and press out some rainbow-inked logos onto the goodie bags. But I got it done, and today there are a slew of pettite baggies drying on from the curtain rods of our french doors, where they were treated with the first un-qualified sunny day in a while.

Having spent what should have been the first hour of my sleep last night hot gluing pin backs onto our little disks (and running out to the living room clutching my ring finger, inquiring the Mr. as to how one might treat a hot glue burn), the disks were ready, today, to sit on the kitchen counter as a bribe to keep the Boy behaved and vegetable-consuming, so that he might be able to help me slather two colors' worth of chalkboard paint onto the half-heartedly sanded surfaces.

This weekend was jam-packed with activities that didn't get us anywhere near a craft store where I might pick up a simple package of wooden blanks — disks, rectangles with rounded corners, polyhedrons — any flat surface to paint and glue and quirkily adorn for yet another goodie bag filler. In my desperation, I was scouring trail shoulders for large dry-ish branches to haul home, wishing we had wooden brooms to curtail. While in dinner preparations I noticed the dowel commissioned from the basement to prop open the kitchen sink window last summer, when it was actually consistently warm enough to do things like shut off the heat and wear short sleeves. Seems it might be a long while before that kind of weather is upon us again, so the dowel has been pressed into service for the impending birthday deadline.

My Teux Deux list for the next week is filled with the steps neccessary to pull off a simple, bring-some-cakelets-into-school-for-a-class-birthday-party. Goodie bags are by no means a neccessity here, but I'm taken with the idea of helping the Boy put together a few hand-crafted take-aways for the event. And for his hard labor, like tonight's stringing of the felt beads into simple necklaces, the Boy's been promised that, while this little school birthday celebration won't net him any presents, he will be satisfactorily showered with love and gifts by his parents, who have better idea of what he wants, anyway.