There will be blood

Sprog 1’s birthday party was AWESOME. There were a few tense moments. Like when I forgot to give the “gross party” entertainers my phone number (and didn’t have theirs), so they couldn’t call to confirm they were coming and just sent a vague email wishing me a “great weekend”. That freaked me out. I mean, shouldn’t they have said “see you on the weekend” if they were actually coming? “Great weekend” implied “enjoy this one, see you next”. They were due at 2.30pm. I was packing death from 2pm onwards. But Ben turned up on time and was lovely. He made chocolate liquid nitrogen ice-cream. He made sherbert. He made vomit bombs. His finale was fake blood wounds. They were quite something. They included authentic-looking swelling and drippy blood bits. I don’t think Ben was accustomed to working with eight-year-old girls, he expressed surprise that no-one poured the fake blood over their heads. The girls were far too worried about staining their nice T-shirts for such shennanigans.

Unfortunately, I was too busy assembling severed finger sausage rolls to photograph the gore. Equally unfortunately, the severed finger sausage rolls weren’t a hit with the eight-year-old girls. I waved them under their noses, they recoiled in horror and politely refused. I offered to remove the onion fingernails, but they still weren’t keen. By 7pm, we’d whittled guest numbers down to seven and parked them in front of Ghostbusters. I should probably have previewed the movie before showing it to five to eight-year-olds. I heard something about “menstruation” while I was cleaning up in the kitchen. And I belatedly remembered a scene were Sigourney Weaver said “I want you inside me” to Billy Murray. But I was too buggered to care. My feet really hurt. I’d been up since 6am prepping for the party, including feeding lunch to 11 people who had come along to “help”. To be fair, they did come in quite handy. I don’t think my dad ever thought he’d be required to cut tiny little spider legs out of liquorice strips and drape them over cupcakes (I have no recollection of him performing such duties during my childhood) but he managed quite well. And that’s it for another year. Well, until March, when I host a disco party for Sprog 2. Then it’s over for good. It’s Dominos pizza around the pool after that (fingers crossed about the pool bit). Or a couple of friends to the movies. Mind you, I say it’s over, then I’ll come up with another theme. Ooooh, I love a theme. I can see all the mocktails with little umbrellas at the Hawaiian luau party now …

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