Another Thing I Am Too Old For

My precious bibliophile daughter turned ten this past week. Ten! I can hardly believe it. She had a pajama party here at the Book Bench house with a bunch of lovely but high spirited girls on Friday night. I am still tired. Her friends know her well and several gave her books and gift cards to the bookstore. We were in the aisles of our local Borders spending one of those cards by noon on Saturday. With a fistful of coupons, she was able to do some damage to their stock. Currently, Hayden is reading three books, Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos, Mary Poppins Comes Back, and The Magician's Elephant. She is also reading a book in school with her class. I don't know how she keeps the plot lines straight. I can't even remember where I put my book down half the time. It's good to be young!

Mixed Reviews

On Friday night my ten year old son saw the new Where the Wild Things Are film as a guest at an eleventh birthday party. He loved it. He was inclined to enjoy the evening as he also went out for pizza beforehand and milkshakes afterward. My nine year old daughter attended the movie at a nine year old's birthday party. My daughter did not enjoy the movie one bit. None of the girls did. Indeed, the birthday girl cried at the sadness and darkness of the film. I did not see it, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to. I adored the book as a child. Actually, I still do. In some review I read, the reviewer made a big deal of the fact that the book only consists of nine sentences so it was doomed to fall short of the original. While I was mentioning that to my kids, my husband said he heard on NPR that it consists of just twelve sentences. Anyone out there curious/anal enough to check it out?

My children have reached unanimity on Jeff Kinney's latest installment in the Wimpy Kid series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days. Both kids laugh out loud love it. Particularly funny to them is when Greg (aptly referred to as a middle school Larry David by his creator) is signed up for a book club by his mother and then not allowed to quit it when all the other boys have dropped out.

What I've Learned About Party Planning

This is what I learned on Friday: if you are planning a Game Night birthday party for your turning nine year old daughter and are stressed out that the fifteen relatives you've invited won't have fun, or the charade topics will be too difficult, or the games will be a bust, arrange to have a black bear give birth to a cub in your yard earlier in the day. You and your guests can watch this display of cute for hours. Hours after giving birth the mother will commence teaching her puffy cub to climb trees, nudging it up with her ample bottom when necessary. It is sweeter than a box of kittens wrapped in cotton candy and tied with a chocolate bow. It worked for me! I did also learn that charades were a big hit as well as my mother-in-law's recipe for Spinach and Artichoke Dip! Although nobody called the next day for an update on the dip.

This is a photo of the mama back when I was calling her "him" just before giving birth. We obviously didn't go near enough to the mother and cub to take any pictures.

This is what I learned today: If in lieu of a birthday cake, your daughter wants polka dotted Rice Krispie treats at her party with girlfriends, let her do the decorating herself because

• your Type A perfectionist personality needs a day off
• nothing is cuter than the tip of the birthday girl's tongue poking out the side of her mouth as she concentrates (except maybe a newborn bear cub)
• it will keep her from asking "How long until my party?" for about half an hour
• the look on her face when handed the tube of frosting is the look I imagine would be on the face of a seventeen year old handed the key to a brand new Ferrari. "Really? I can drive this?"

Again, it worked for me.