Eight is Great
Today was Cordelia's eight birthday party. Blake's away and Tanya, who usually backs me up at birthday parties, was busy with many things, so I was faced with managing by myself. It didn't take much thought to realize that that wasn't going to go well, so I threw up the bat signal to our babysitter from last year, Emma. Against all odds she was available, so I had a helper.
The party was loosely candy themed (because who doesn't like candy?) so we started by making candy sushi. I wasn't sure how it would go, with the stickiness and general potential for chaos, but everyone managed fine and made pretty credible rolls. And didn't even get incredibly sticky.
Next on the agenda was Pin the Cherry on the Ice Cream. It soon became apparent why no-one plays this game any more, because everyone just used their hands to figure out where the cherry went and it wasn't much of a contest. We made a rule that you could only use one hand, but it still wasn't that challenging. The most fun player was the youngest, who got all silly and giggly and fell over a lot, so Emma and I decide that maybe the peak age for "Pin the X on the Y" is a little younger than eight.
Next up was Pass the Parcel. We added a rule that if you already have a prize and the music stops when you have the parcel, you can decide whether to keep what you have, or pass it on to the next person who doesn't have a prize and open the next layer of the parcel. It was a pretty good solution to the problem of matching n prizes to n kids, but of course some of the prizes became inexplicably more valued than others, and there was fighting and unsuccessful attempts at trading. It was quite acrimonious and also rather annoying.
The last planned activity was Cordelia's idea: a few rousing rounds of Murder Handshake. It was okay, but the littlest kids didn't really manage the part where you have to shake two more people's hands; they would just collapse straight away. And when Otis was murderer he shook hands with such vigor that it was pretty clear what he was up to. So it seems the best age for Murder Handshake is a little older than eight.
Lunch was KFC (which seems like an obvious choice for party food but which I've never seen at another kid party) and then we finished with cake and more candy.
It was a pretty good party, but I really hope I'm done with kid parties. I like throwing the kind of parties where I actually get to have fun, not just co-ordinate other people's fun and listen to them whine. But next year Cordelia is nine, and surely that's too old for a games-and-cake party. Maybe we'll go to the Science Center or something. That would be nice.
Cordelia is Eight
So Cordelia is eight. She's not too excited about growing up; in fact she's downright against it. But it's happening anyway. She says she doesn't like school, but she seems to have fun when she's there. She loves ballet and jazz dance and Brownies. She has a couple of good friends and gets along well with most of the kids in her class. And she can manage the rest of them.
The other day we were chatting about her friends and relationships, and she said "I don't tell grown-ups about problems because they don't really help. They say they're going to help but they don't do anything." Last year she had some trouble with a girl who was her best friend a couple of years ago, and who got caught up with a third girl and started excluding her. She didn't come to me for help, and this year (so far) they are all three getting along together. She's also done well managing a couple of difficult boys in her class.
Grown-ups love Cordelia — at least, grown-ups who love kids love Cordelia. Grown-ups who don't love kids love Delphine because she's like a grown-up, but Cordelia's such a kid. She's enthusiastic and noisy and uninhibited. She loves talking to grown-ups and she still has that habit of telling long, involved stories without giving enough context, which is fascinating and occasionally surreal.
She's kind of getting too old for me to blog about her. When the kids were younger I treated them like extensions of myself, and of course it was okay to blog about them. But there's a lot of talk about Internet privacy lately, and what you're entitled to post about other people with or without their consent, and I'm starting to realize (a little belatedly) that even if I don't mind my whole life being online, that's not a decision I should make for the girls. But I guess that's another blog post...